Warlord
by WynCatastrophe
Summary: On a distant planet in the Unknown Regions, Obi-Wan Kenobi remains in the clutches of criminal mastermind Granta Omega.  His Padawan Anakin Skywalker rushes to save him, but darkness clouds the way, and the fate of one may may change the galaxy ...
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. I am not making any profit from this work of fan fiction.

Author's note: This chapter dedicated to pronker, for the wonderfully encouraging review she left at the end of _Hunters_.

Soundtrack: _Stand My Ground_, Within Temptation.

**Chapter One:**

"Please tell me you have a plan," Evinne said, keeping pace beside Ryn with a deep sense of unease.

"I have a plan," Ryn said.

"Oh, good."

"You just heard it."

"_What?_"

"We need to get in touch with the High King," Ryn went on, ignoring her. "Or at least Sarta."

"Well, yeah ..."

They had lapsed into their native language, and now Anakin looked confused. "Sarta?" he said dubiously.

"However this goes down, it's going to affect all of Loreth," Ryn said, in Basic this time.

"Loreth?" Evinne snorted. "Try the whole system. Hell, if Omega is smart, he could maybe screw up the entire galaxy."

"He's smart," Anakin said.

"So we'll have to be smarter," Ryn said. "Or something."

"Way to inspire the troops," Evinne said.

"You're not the troops." Ryn scowled at the gates as they approached the fortress. "How fast can you raise an army?"

"Say two days to get everyone here, three to march?"

Ryn grimaced. "That's not good. We need to move quickly, before Omega decides to take Obi-Wan and go."

"How do you know he hasn't done that already?" Evinne demanded.

"I don't. But if he's gone, I can't explain the bolg."

Evinne wasn't sure she could explain the bolg anyway, but now seemed like a bad time to bring that up. "What are you going to do with the hedge-witches?" she wanted to know. "Do you even know _how_ to raise the land?"

"Not so much." They waved to the gate guards and passed in. "The only thing I know for sure is that it won't work if I don't try."

"Do _not_ start speaking in aphorisms," Evinne said.

* * *

><p>Anakin kept staring at her, watching Ryn as she paced up and down the hall, consumed with thought.<p>

It should have been unnerving, but Ryn had too much else on her mind at the moment.

His voice drew her up short anyway. "What do you know about this Khalî?"

Ryn almost flinched. "It's bad luck to say her name, for one thing."

"You said it," Anakin pointed out.

"I was trying to explain the situation." Aware she was being defensive, Ryn took a slow breath and deliberately adjusted her stance. "Sorry. What did you want to know?"

"Who is she? What does she want? How do we stop her?"

"An ancient goddess," Ryn said. "She feeds on death, so probably she wants that. And I don't know."

"But you ... you know about her from stories, right?" Anakin made a gesture of frustration. "How did the Lorethans stop her the first time?"

"The _ylfe_," Ryn corrected him. "And they didn't so much stop the Dark Goddess as _contain_ her."

"So just how powerful is she?" Anakin asked, looking nervous but determined "And where does she _get_ her power?"

Ryn sighed. "I'm not sure," she admitted. "The cave drawings at Dunhara suggest that during the last great war she found a way to make herself the focal point for all the - the - I don't know, the rage and antipathy and will to destroy -"

"That sounds like the Dark Side," Anakin put in.

"I'm not sure," Ryn answered. "The legends I know don't mention the Force. But whatever it was, she made herself the focal point for it on this planet. All that energy funneled through her, and gave her strength."

"How?" asked Anakin, and Ryn threw up her hands.

"I _don't know_!" she exclaimed, goaded. "This all happened millennia before I was born!" She stopped, her breath ragged with nerves, and dragged her hands through her filthy hair. _I want a bath,_ she thought dazedly. _I want a bath and a hot meal and to wake up and find out all this was a dream._

She wanted all that, and some other things she was afraid to think about.

_Anakin ..._

He jerked as he felt her inadvertent touch at the edges of his perception, and Ryn cringed, caught.

"Sorry," she whispered.

But Anakin stepped closer, shifting the intensity of his focus to _her_, now, instead of the mission. "What _was_ that, back there?" he asked her, his voice low and humming with power. "You threatened to _kill_ me. What _was_ that?"

Ryn swallowed hard, struggling to hold his gaze. "I can't betray Loreth," she told him, and felt proud that her voice only shook a little. "And it's dangerous for everyone."

"Who's _everyone_?"

"You, me, Loreth ... maybe the whole galaxy."

He frowned at her. "Now you're being hyper - hyperble - hyperbolic."

That had to be a word he learned from Obi-Wan. "I am not given to poetic exaggeration," Ryn countered evenly, because fortunately she had learned it from Obi-Wan, too. "The truth is more than enough."

Anakin's exasperation was clear. "But why wouldn't you _trust_ me?"

"You're a Jedi," Ryn reminded him. "And the secret was not mine to share."

"But you _didn't_ share it!" Anakin fumed for a minute, stomping back and forth. "What else aren't you telling me?"

"A lot of things," Ryn answered. She eyed him closely. "But you knew that, Anakin. I never pretended I wasn't keeping secrets."

"You never said you would kill me for them!" Anakin shouted - and then added, as an afterthought: "As if you could."

"It would be a close thing," Ryn agreed. It flashed through her mind, automatically, that she could beat him more easily if he kept underestimating her, and she had to fight down bile. _What kind of person _am_ I? What kind of friend?_ She cleared her throat and tried again: "Anakin ... with the freedom of thousands and the safety of trillions at stake, I _can't_ put you first. I don't have the right." She hesitated. "Would you love me if I did?"

"_I don't love you anyway!_" Anakin's words hit her like the lashes of a whip.

Ryn swayed, clutching the edge of the table and then slowly righting herself. "You - you don't mean that."

"Yes I do! And you obviously don't care about me at all! Friends don't -" He kept talking - _yelling_ - but Ryn couldn't make sense of what he was saying. It hurt too much.

"I have to go," she whispered numbly, into the middle of his tirade, and walked away.

She realized, as she stepped out of the hall into the golden sunlight, that she must be having what was called a dissociative episode. She didn't know who she was, and nothing felt real.

_Thank the Saints for that,_ she thought, quite distinctly, and kept moving.

Somewhere she was aware that she felt so _destroyed_ because she hadn't just lost Anakin, her best friend, the boy she'd laughed with and fought beside and longed for with all her battered heart. She'd lost the only person in her life who had ever said that he loved her. And he had _taken it back_.

She kept hearing the echo of her foster-father's words: _you were never made for love, my daughter._

_Fine,_ Ryn thought recklessly. _So you said I'd never make love? Watch me make war._


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is entirely a work of fan fiction, from which I am not making any profit.

Author's note: This chapter is dedicated to the people who left reviews last time: pronker, What-Ansketil-Did-Next, and Estora. Your lovely comments gave me so much encouragement!

**CHAPTER TWO**

It took Anakin the better part of an hour to admit he'd screwed up with Ryn, nearly two to go look for her to try again, and a full three hours before he began to worry about what he'd do if she wouldn't talk to him.

He finally tracked her down in the stables, where she is discussing the disposition of cavalry with an older man Anakin recognized as one of Aharu's warriors.

"Ryn," he said, and she turned to face him, her face too carefully blank.

"Yes?" she said, perfectly measured, but Anakin couldn't breathe because there was a stranger in her eyes.

He took a step backwards. "I - I wanted to talk to you."

"Here I am."

_But it's not you,_ he wanted to say, but that would sound ridiculous. Her green eyes were cold and somehow remote, yet stared right through him. It was unnerving. Anakin wet his lips. "Can we ... go outside?"

"Certainly." Ryn made her excuses to the warrior and led the way out into the sunlight.

In the bright spring air she turned to face him. "Well? What did you want?"

"I just ... I came to ..." This was all wrong. Ryn was supposed to be hurt and sad, and he was supposed to apologize profusely, and then they would make it better by promising never to doubt each other again. "Would you really have killed me?" he blurted instead.

Ryn sighed, hands braced around her slender hips. "That's what you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Just answer the question!"

Ryn lowered her head in resignation, glancing away from him across the rolling plains. "I loved you more than anything in my life." Anakin didn't miss the past tense. "I'd die in your place, if it would do any good. But for the safety of Loreth, and maybe the galaxy ... yes, Anakin, I would kill you." She turned and met his eyes. "Was there anything else?"

There were too _many_ things, but he couldn't find words for any of them, so in the end he shook his head silently and watched her walk away.

[]

About an hour after she overhauled the dun's forces, Ryn found Aharu's advisor hidden in her little cell, outside the main house but close to it, a small den of a place partly sunk below ground level so that she had to step down to go inside.

"I have to confess," she announced, stooping warily into the first room, "all my experience of torture so far has been on the receiving end." She gave the sorceress a conspiratorial grin. "So you'll have to tell me if I'm doing it wrong."

The witch hissed in indignation. "Impudent bitch-whelp!" she crowed. "You think your brute strength is any match for the wisdom of the ages?"

"Aw, thanks," Ryn said, not taking the bait. "I've never been credited with brute strength before."

The crone made a dart toward the door and Ryn slid left to block her path, eerily certain that the witch couldn't possibly be dull enough not to anticipate her move. "Here's the thing," she said evenly. "You are going to tell me everything you know about the offworlder Granta Omega, including anything you and your assistant may have told him about the dark goddess Khalî."

The crone hesitated. "And in return?"

Ryn bared her teeth again, fiercely genial. "Not a damn thing."

The old witch snorted. "That's not much incentive for me to cooperate, is it?"

"Sure it is," Ryn said. "Because when you give me what I want, I'll stop pounding on you."

She hissed again. "The hands that touch me will be cursed."

"Welcome to my life," Ryn said, and pinned her anyway.

[]

In the end Aharu's witch - though maybe it was more the other way around - did tell her what she knew, though Ryn suspected this was probably out of apathy rather than fear. Slamming the crone's head into her apothecary table a few times wasn't enough torture to make anyone break, and if she had been easily intimidated, she wouldn't have outlasted three regimes and two stormings of the dun.

When she was done, she left the old witch under guard and went to tell Evinne and Anakin the good news.

"Not that there's much of it," she added when she'd tracked them down - Evinne first, because it hurt too much to be alone with Anakin. "The crone says she suspects Omega is trying to rival Khalî, usurp her source of power, rather than ally himself with her. She claims to know nothing about Obi-Wan's capture, but says that _if_ Omega is using a Jedi, he may be trying to find that power using the Force."

"That's bad, right?" Anakin said. His eyes were wide with worry, and Ryn felt her heart twist in her chest, aching in sympathy.

_Stop that,_ she told herself, and kept going. "She seems to think it won't work," Ryn said. "I couldn't make sense of all she said - it's beyond my training - but I gathered that the crone thinks trying to find Khalî's power is a mistake, and that the Force will only ... flow around it, or something. Once she started talking, it was pretty clear she didn't think much of Omega."

"He's dangerous," Anakin said, and Ryn nodded.

"Fools often are," Evinne said, and Ryn nodded to that, too.

"The crone says Omega thinks we're ... some sort of heathen, worshipping natural phenomena. She thinks he has gone North to find the source of power. Her apprentice has gone with him as a guide, but she says she did not give her permission."

"He knows we don't actually worship Khalî at all, right?"

Ryn grimaces. "Have you searched your father's room?"

"What?" Evinne said. "No!"

Ryn reached into her utility belt and pulled out a rough stone carving, dark with blood. "Here." She tossed it to Evinne. "I'll lay odds you'll find its match in your father's chamber."

She saw Evinne's eyes go wide with fear, her face taking on the sickly cast of nausea. "But this - this is Khalî's token."

"The womb of death," Ryn agreed, feeling a little sick herself. "I searched the dun after I left the advisor's cell. I'm sorry, Evinne."

Evinne's hands were shaking. "But how could I ... how could I not _know_?"

"You want my guess?" She waited for Evinne's nod. "You were part of the deal," she said slowly. "I don't have proof. But that man he ordered you to marry ... there wasn't something wrong about him."

"I know," Evinne said. "That's why I ran."

"Good move," Ryn said. "But I don't think he was bidding with what you thought he was. I heard rumors, then and after. He was ... off, somehow. So maybe you were meant to be the sacrifice, and you weren't supposed to know."

Evinne looked sicker; Ryn could sense her forcibly restraining the urge to vomit. "That's ..." she said, her voice trailing off as she searched for a word.

"I know," Ryn said. "And maybe I'm wrong. But the pieces fit. And Aharu's rise to power was ... well, contrary to reason."

"I'll have his quarters searched today," Evinne whispered, and then shook herself. "No. I'll do it myself. The men shouldn't have to ... but something is bothering me."

_Just one thing?_ Ryn thought, but she said, "Yeah?"

"The girl ... the apprentice. She couldn't have left without Aesin'Uleia's knowledge."

Ryn shrugged. "Maybe. I sensed a lot of anger there, but it was pretty unfocused. Here's the _really_ bad news: the crone knows we're trying to raise the land. She says she knows how to do it ... but only with living sacrifice."

"Sentient?" Evinne asked, and Ryn nodded once more. The older girl closed her eyes.

Anakin made a frustrated noise: the fury of a trapped animal.

"Yeah," Ryn said, glancing at him. "That was my reaction, too. So either the crone was lying, which I didn't get, or ... we're in more trouble than we thought."

"There has to be another way," Anakin said angrily.

Well. That was Anakin all over. Ryn did her best to take it in stride. "That won't help us unless we can figure out what it is," Ryn answered. She rubbed her acing forehead with dirty fingertips. "I have the beginnings of an idea, but even _I_ don't like it."

"I'm afraid to ask," Evinne said.

Anakin shot her a look. "What is it, Ryn?"

Ryn hesitated, biting her lip. "I can make flowers bloom," she began slowly.

Anakin frowned. "How does that help?" he asked, but Evinne was getting it.

"You need more of that power," she deduced. "This is the same thing, on a larger scale."

"Maybe not the _same_," Ryn cautioned. "But I'm hoping it's close enough." She scrubbed her hands through her filthy hair. "There is a condition some women have that Healers call a hostile womb. I don't know what causes it, exactly, but ... we need to make Loreth hostile to Khalî. And I guess to Omega, as well."

"How?" Evinne asked, and Ryn sighed.

"I'm working on it." Evinne's expression said plainly what she thought of that. "It's the best I can do," she said, shrugging helplessly. "This isn't my field. And there's ... something else."

"What now?" Evinne asked wearily.

Ryn winced. "She cursed me."

Evinne closed her eyes. "Of course she did. What's the curse?"

"She didn't say," Ryn admitted. "I left her under guard, but I don't kid myself that she won't be able to throw the curse anyway."

"So that's a problem," Evinne concluded. "Saints. Didn't we have enough to worry about?"

"It never rains but it pours," Ryn said.

Evinne laughed without much humor. "Great. Well, don't tell anybody else about it yet. A curse is hell on morale."

_You can't give me orders,_ Ryn thought, but Evinne was right, so she kept her mouth shut. "I'm going to go clean up," she said instead. "See you at supper."


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, from which I am not making any profit.

Author's notes:

One: I have to confess, I'm not terribly happy with this chapter. It feels OOC to me, for Anakin. But I've fiddled with it for days, and I'm not getting any closer to the answer. Probably it will hit me in the middle of the night, after posting, when it won't do any good. Either way, I'm going to go ahead and post this now. If anybody has thoughts on this, please share.

Two: This chapter is dedicated to the two people who reviewed last time: estora and pronker! Thanks, guys! You made my day! :)

**CHAPTER THREE**

Evinne put her hands on her hips and glared at him once Ryn was gone. The stance looked so much like Ryn's, earlier - except Ryn had looked despairing, and Evinne mostly looked disgusted - that it made something in Anakin's chest hurt.

"I don't know what you did," Evinne said, beyond exasperated, "but _somehow_ you have made it worse."

"It was her fault!" Anakin protested automatically, and then flinched when Evinne narrowed her eyes at him.

"I know you're hurt," she told him, a little roughly. "I know ... I don't think I've ever seen anyone as desperate to be _right_ as you are ... and I know you must have reasons that you don't tell." She shook her head, looking tireder than Anakin had ever seen her. "You're damaged goods, Anakin. I get that. But I wonder if ... if sometimes you forget that Ryn? She's damaged, too."

Anakin opened his mouth to speak, but Evinne just raised her head and _looked _at him until he shut it again.

"You may be right," she said, finally. "Ryn may have overreacted. And ... I'm sure knowing that she would sacrifice you to save Loreth ... has to hurt. But Ryn is the same person she's always been, this whole time. And you knew who she was. Didn't you?"

"I ..." Anakin floundered, because honestly he didn't know.

"You can keep this up if you want to," Evinne said. "I know Ryn will work with you to get Obi-Wan back no matter what. But you have to ask yourself: is this how you want to lose her?" And then she did the unexpected: instead of ending with another glare, she stepped forward to kiss him lightly on the cheek. "Think about it," she told him, and left.

* * *

><p>Maybe she should have stayed and talked to Skywalker a little more. Been a little more gentle. He had that <em>broken<em> look in his eyes, though Areth'ryn (for once) seemed to be ignoring it. But comfort wasn't exactly Evinne's specialty, and she didn't think Skywalker wanted a pity fuck. So that left her with trying to help in ways that were more familiar to her style. Beating the snot out of someone came to mind.

If anyone had told her, a year ago, that she would be spending today babysitting the Chosen One and the insufferable good girl of Clan Orun, she'd have ... told them to sleep it off, probably. But here she was, and they took a _lot_ of looking after. Skywalker was ... okay. Not what she'd expected the Chosen One to be, but okay. A genuinely decent being. Perennially obsessed with proving himself, but then he'd been a slave: that had to do stuff to you. The way he coped was by proving, every day, that he was _better than that_. Areth'ryn was the real problem, for now. Evinne knew fear when she saw it: that girl was _terrified_. Not of Skywalker, not really - if she took the time to think, Ryn had good enough sense to know that Skywalker was the last person who would ever betray any of them: he was loyal to a fault. But Evinne figured she might be afraid of herself. All these feelings. It was there in her body language, the way she moved around Skywalker as though trapped in a disintegrating orbit. This, maybe, was Ryn trying to break free.

In Evinne's opinion, she could have picked a better time to do it.

All those months of staring helplessly at her Jedi friend, longing. Surely she could have chosen a better time - _any_ time had to be better than this - to prove she had a mind of her own.

But duty was all Ryn knew, so of course she was grasping at it in the moment of crisis. A way to choose duty over love: a _final_ choice.

_Sorry, Shorty. Your resolution will just have to wait. Life doesn't promise closure._

In the meantime, the best Evinne could do was damage control, since both her companions seemed eager to self-destruct. She pushed open the door to the ancient cell and looked around for her grandfather's advisor - some said lover.

All said _witch_.

"Aesin'Evinne," the old woman said, in that raspy voice Evinne remembered from her childhood. "I have heard thy name often of late."

"I've been busy," Evinne agreed. "And I won't waste time now." She took a deep breath. "You told Areth'ryn you were cursing her." The old woman nodded slowly. "But you haven't done it yet." Eyebrows went up. "You told me once only a fool lays a curse without knowing the object. You don't know Ryn that well yet."

"You're assuming a lot."

"Tell me I'm wrong."

Her grandfather's advisor eyed her warily. "And you're here to make sure I don't lay the curse."

"Depends." Evinne rocked back on her heels. "What will it take?"

* * *

><p>Anakin found Ryn in her bath, not without some difficulty. There were guards at the door of what he would have called the 'fresher, but which contained nothing but bathtubs, a cauldron of simmering water, and clouds of billowing steam.<p>

_And Ryn._

He didn't get the opportunity to see all that at first, because the guards were not impressed with his request.

There were four of them, which seemed a little excessive, and Anakin only recognized one of them: a weedy youth who had been a farmhand before answering the call for a weaponstake, and who clearly regarded Ryn as hardly less than divine, a terrifyingly beautiful goddess of war and adolescent daydreams. He spoke first, stepping forward to bar Anakin's path while the other three looked bored.

"My lady Areth'ryn is in her bath," he informed Anakin, voice cracking.

"She can talk to me anyway," Anakin pronounced, waving his fingers past the boy's face.

Sloppy. The youth's eyes went blank and glazed as he echoed Anakin, but he hadn't put enough Force behind the suggestion to carry the other three, or maybe they were just too strongminded for it to take.

The oldest of them reached forward to grab the boy's shoulder and pull him back into line. "_No_," she told both of them, looking exasperated. "She can't." She eyed Anakin with distaste, apparently for his ineptitude. "You can come back when she's done."

"I need to see her now," Anakin said.

"You will have to wait," the woman answered.

One of her companions touched her elbow and whispered something in Lorethan; the older woman huffed a breath and raked another gaze over Anakin, appraising him with sharp green eyes that looked eerily like he thought Ryn's might, twenty years harder.

"Wait here," she instructed him peremptorily, and turned to crack the door. The other three immediately closed ranks in front of the opening, so Anakin couldn't see much past them but steam, but he heard Ryn's voice, speaking her native language in a low murmur.

The guard pulled back and pushed the door open further, casting Anakin a look that said clearly that she thought Ryn was making a mistake. She kept her mouth shut and closed the door behind him anyway.

Ryn was sitting upright in an enormous tub of hammered metal. She had her knees drawn up out of the water and sat casually resting her elbows on them, her wrists dangling loosely, fingers teasing the surface of the water. Her black hair was soaked and dripping, so she must have washed it at some point, but now it was piled on top of her head, held there by two ivory sticks, darker than her skin.

"Well?" she asked into the silence, disrupting Anakin's study of her. "You wanted to talk to me?"

"I ..." Anakin pulled his gaze, tracing the lines of the room, looking anywhere but at her. Ryn was naked, _right there_, and it should have been arousing but instead he felt vaguely sick. He'd never felt like this with her before, not even when she'd asked him to touch her in the showers on Fjornel, clearly way past the kind of intimacy they should have had.

It struck him, dully, that this was because out of all the times he'd seen her naked - and there had been a lot of them, for a friendship that had lasted barely seven months - this was the first time Ryn hadn't wanted him there. The first time he was intruding.

The first time he didn't belong.

"Yes?" Ryn prompted, a trace of impatience coloring her tone, and Anakin dragged his eyes back to her face.

"I just wanted to be sure we understood each other," Anakin began, and he could hear that he was trying too hard, that his voice was coming out angry instead of scared. He pushed on anyway. "_Nothing_ can get in the way of finding Obi-Wan. _Nothing._ This thing with us ... we can't let it interfere. We have to keep working together." _That's not what I came here to say, get to the point, just tell her ..._

Ryn watched him, her eyes tracked on his face, unreadable. "Okay," she said, when he'd paused for breath and realized that he had no idea what to say next.

"Okay?" Anakin repeated, feeling adrift.

"You're right," Ryn said. "We do have to keep working together."

"...Oh."

Ryn waited, watching him expectantly. The silence stretched out, became even more uncomfortable than their conversation had been. _I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, why can't I just take it -_

"Was there something else?" Ryn asked finally.

"I ... Um. No?" He said it like a question.

Ryn frowned at him. "Do you need to watch me bathe for us to work together?"

"What?" Anakin jerked. "No!"

Ryn just stared at him, eyebrows raised, until it penetrated that she meant he should leave.

She was _asking_ him to _leave_.

The shame rose like a red tide to cover his cheeks, tainted with anger.

"Just so we're clear," he ground out, and left.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

Author's note: I got my writer's block unstuck, and here is the result. Special thanks to those who have reviewed so far. You are a select and wonderful group. :)

**CHAPTER FOUR**

The shadows breathes in, savoring the distant flavor of a young boy's pain. Breathes out, releasing a sigh of lingering delectation. Somewhere in the galaxy - somewhere on the edge of another - Anakin Skywalker is exquisitely unhappy.

Even better, he is _confused_.

The Force shows him the striking girl who accompanied the Jedi to his office only once before. The shadow stretches out to taste to her and finds the sharp tang of sorrow. A counterpoint to Skywalker's storm of fevered passion.

_So._

An operative had asked him - oh, months ago now, before she ever met Skywalker - whether the girl should be quietly eliminated. What purpose that? She could be a tool as well as a hindrance - like Kenobi, like even old Yoda himself, all unknowing. All the shadow had to do was let her stay and let Skywalker be himself.

The rest would be inevitable as falling.

* * *

><p><em>We need Gunryth<em>. Ryn stood on the high stone wall and watched the sun set over her home planet.

Obi-Wan would say that her focus determined her reality. If that was true ... _Are my doubts making things worse?_

She turned North and stared into the distance, eyes straining for things she knew weren't there, all her senses reaching for any sign of her brother. _Please be all right._

* * *

><p>They gathered around the table at one end of the main hall. Ryn stood with her hands braced flat against the table's surface, as though the physical support could help her give the bad news.<p>

"Okay," she said, dragging in a harsh breath. "Here's the thing. Aharu's advisor is perfectly capable of raising the land against Khalî. Unfortunately, she is very unlikely to help us do it. She has enough artifacts related to her worship to convince any reasonable person that she is Khalî's servant. I can't think of any incentive we could offer that would persuade her to change allegiance now. Khalî is not known for her mercy to the disloyal.

"We have the hedge witches and healers," Evinne said, looking worried. "But who's going to lead them?"

Ryn took another breath. "We are."

Dead silence. Evinne recovered her voice first. "_What?_"

"We are of the old kind," Ryn said. "We carry the birthright, you and I."

Evinne drew up and stared at her. "The old power of the _ylfe_? The sovereignty?"

"Can you think of a better way?"

"Women don't -"

"They don't," Ryn said, "but they did." She straightened her shoulders. "Besides, we have something no one else has ever had."

Evinne raised her eyebrows in question. "What's that?"

"The Chosen One."

Silence again. Evinne looked from her to Anakin and back again. "What's Skywalker got to do with it?"

Ryn pulled a sheaf of papers - not flimsis - out and spread them on the tabletop. "I had the women you summoned draw maps of the energy in this place." She touched the bold symbol drawn on each map, different each time but always larger than any of the others. "They're not artists, but it's pretty clear they're all trying to represent a particularly intense energy signature. I took down verbal descriptions, too. They make sense if you know Anakin."

"Or if you're obsessed," Evinne said, eyes wary on her. "Ryn, get a grip. Anakin Skywalker is not the answer to _everything_."

"Except when he is," Ryn said - right over Anakin, who was saying _hey, I'm standing right here_. Ryn shot him a look and he shut up, which wasn't as satisfying as it should have been. "Look," she said to both of them, employing a little Basic slang because she could. "We _belong_ to the land. That's a good start. But we have to be able to come back, not lose ourselves in the planet somewhere." She gestured with fingers still bleeding from the rest of her day. "If we create the dyad around Anakin as the center ..." She drew some quick marks on the paper. "We get an anchor, of sorts. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that we get a new center of gravity."

"_Gravity_?" Evinne said, plainly disbelieving.

"It's a figure of speech," Ryn answered. "But all language is figurative anyway, so it doesn't matter. The point is: _this will work_."

Evinne and Anakin exchanged glances. "Are you sure?" the former asked, and Ryn almost laughed.

"Hell no," she said, punch-drunk. "This plan is suicidal. But it's the best I've got."

They both stared at her.

"Fuck," Evinne said, finally.

"Tell me about it," Ryn responded feelingly.

"_Fuck_," Evinne said again, and then she met Ryn's eyes. "You're crazy."

"Yeah," said Ryn. "But I'm also right."

Evinne mouthed _fuck_ again, not inventive but heartfelt, and turned to Anakin. "Skywalker, you game?"

Anakin breathed in, refusing to look in Ryn's direction. "We have to get Obi-Wan back," he said, like it was a mantra. "I'm in."

"Okay." Ryn slapped the table with her open hand. "We start at midnight, out in the courtyard. I'll put together a chorus of adepts to give us some weight." She gathered the papers in one hand and pointed them at Evinne. "Find someone you can trust and set them to watch your grandfather's witch and what's left of your family while this goes down. We can't take any chances."

Evinne snorted. "Better forget this plan, then."

"Evinne -"

The older girl raised her hands. "I know, I know. Best we've got. I'll take care of it."

"Thanks." Ryn shifted her gaze to Anakin, trying to see _teammate_ instead of _lover_. They'd never really gotten there except in her head, anyway. "If you want some meditation aids, anything like that, you'll find them in an artificial cave beneath the courtyard where we're meeting tonight."

"I'm fine," Anakin said tightly.

"Okay." Ryn clenched her jaw and _did not push_. "I'm going to try and get some rest before tonight. If anybody needs me, I'll be down near the south wall."

"Ryn," Evinne began, and Ryn turned to look at her. "Just ... be careful, okay?"

Ryn forced a grin. "Why start now?" she asked, and left.

* * *

><p>They meet in the central courtyard, the focus of the dun's native power, or so the Lorethans say. Anakin is trying to take it on faith.<p>

The night is dark, darker than he's used to on Loreth, heavy cloud cover hiding even the triple moons. Evinne explains in an aside that the tang in the air bespeaks impending rain.

It should be Ryn explaining this, and it hurts until it makes him angry. She's being _unreasonable_. She's _wrong_. But she's also _hurting_, and Anakin doesn't know what to do about any of it.

She's almost too sharp, now. Fierce, driven, focused. People get out of her way and can't help following. She hurts to look at, and yet she won't let you look away. She is ... _riveting_. She's like free fall, the rush in his ears, terrifying.

It's not supposed to be this way. Ryn has always been the safe place. If he could just _reach_ her, maybe everything could somehow still be all right again. But _nobody_ can reach her now. It's not even that she feels withdrawn. If anything, she's a little too invested. But it's like ... nothing _stops_ her, any more. She gives no quarter, especially to herself, and just keeps _going_.

It's more than a little unnerving.

"All right, people," she says, surveying them. Anakin has to listen closely to follow her native tongue. "We've only got one shot at this. If we're very careful and nothing goes wrong and we get _very_ lucky, we might just make it work."

"Way to inspire the troops," Evinne mutters, and Ryn almost cracks a smile.

"I'm not going to pretend things are better than they are," she says in answer. "But we _do_ stand a chance. So let's take it for all it's worth, all right?"

Over the distant sound of thunder, the Force-adepts gathered in the courtyard murmur their approval.

Evinne steps into the center of the forming circle with Ryn. "You realize if we succeed, we'll be making history."

Ryn actually laughs. "We're making history either way." She nods to Anakin. "Come on," she tells him, and casts a glance at the others. "You understand what to do? Here we go."

* * *

><p>The Lorethans strip naked and paint themselves with alien symbols in the dark, smelling of rain. Evinne and Ryn together help Anakin out of his clothes and trace the same designs on his body, whorl marks and the patterns of the world, a map of energy laid out on his skin.<p>

They reach past him and touch each other, the contact almost sexual in its potency - from the outside, anyway. They let go and come to join hands around him, forming a tight circle with Anakin at the center.

"What do you want me to do?" he asks quietly, but the answer doesn't help much:

"Sh," Ryn tells him, "just be."

So Anakin tries to _be_, whatever that means, and feels the energy tighten around them as the two women join each other in some sort of wordless chant, whose harmonies are picked up and played out by the ring of Force-adepts around them, who also beat the ground in a driving rhythm.

It really is like gravity, more than Anakin would have expected, anyway. He can feel the energy concentrating on them, spinning out in orbit like the far-flung arms of the galaxy itself, building rotation.

When the storm breaks, it's practically orgasmic: a quick rush of _release_ that sends a shockwave of power into the life of the planet, the swirl in the Force that signifies _Loreth_.

In the wake of that release, charged with meaning, all is still. Slowly Anakin opens eyes he doesn't remember closing and takes in the first gray light of dawn.

Evinne and Ryn break apart, gasping raggedly, as exhausted as he has ever seen either of them. Even the circle of dancing Force-adepts, grinding slowly to a halt, looks wrung-out, breathing hard in the aftermath of ecstasy.

"Did it work?" Evinne pants, clutching at Anakin's shoulder for support.

Ryn nods shakily, weaving on her feet. Anakin holds out a hand to help her, but she waves him off. (He can't tell whether she means it as a dismissal or not.) "I think so," she rasps. "Time will tell for sure." She throws her head back and looks at the sky, her white throat exposed to the morning. "Saints, I'm tired. Who's ready for bed?"

It's anticlimactic, but then Anakin realizes there's nothing else they can do. So they gather their discarded clothing and stagger wearily back into the main house, to surrender to the sleep of exhaustion.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

Author's notes:

1) So, I'm aware that this chapter is ridiculously short. There was another version, that was longer with battles and stuff, but ultimately it didn't work out that well or make much sense, plot-wise. So I wrote this instead, and I think it is qualitatively better, even though there is less of it. Hopefully I'll be able to update again in the next week or so. I'm aiming for weekly or bi-weekly updates on this fic.

2) Also, this chapter is dedicated to the two wonderful people who reviewed last time: the always-insightful pronker and the darkly encouraging What-Ansketil-Did-Next. Thanks, you guys, you gave me a boost when I needed it!

**CHAPTER FIVE**

It was still early in the day when they left, mounting the majestic sleipniri of Clan Ardel's rolling hills and riding North and East, letting the wind buffet their left shoulders. The storm that had threatened during the night had broken over the plains, and they rode through the rain, lashed by its wet, stinging whips. Yet the air remained heavy with portent, charged as if the storm had not given it release.

The treeless hills offered little in the way of shelter. No one wanted to stop for rest in the downpour, so they charged on, surging over the hills like a force of nature themselves, stopping only to water their mounts in the many streams that flooded down between the shoulders of the land.

Anakin could see Ryn only intermittently, riding at the front of the war-band, half-hidden by the rain and the larger shapes around her. But he could _feel_ her, all the time, and it was ... worrying. She felt like a lightsaber in his mind, bright and hard and dangerous.

_She's always been like that,_ he told himself, but it wasn't very convincing. Probably this had always been inside Ryn - she had been a war hero before she ever came to the Jedi - but he had always known her in safety mode. For all her intensity, she had been safe to him. Not a warlord, just Ryn.

This was Ryn with the safety off, and Anakin wasn't sure he liked it.

It was worse, knowing that it was at least partly his fault. If the Ryn he'd known was gone - all her lightness and sweetness and wry humor - it was because he'd failed her, with his thoughtless, callous words.

He kept trying to pry through her defenses and catch a sense of her, some hint that the Ryn he knew was still inside somewhere, biding her time. But he couldn't even find her shields: just a blinding energy that had to be the will she was training on all of them to make this motley group a single force. From what little he understood of Lorethan war-making, that was what their leaders _did_: they bent their will on the war-band so the group functioned as a whole. _A pack mentality_, Evinne has said. _We are stronger together._ And Ryn had been good at it, in her time here. A master of the 'hero-halo,' whatever that was.

"She's a hero," the boy to his right whispered, gazing at Ryn in fervent adoration as he echoed Anakin's own musings.

_Ryn,_ Anakin thought, _what are you doing?_

[]

She came to check on him after they finally stopped for the night, under the lee of a gentle hill that at least broke the wind of the fading storm.

The air still felt charged around them.

"Are you all right?" she asked him, unwinding the scarf from around her face to look at him directly.

"I'm fine," Anakin muttered, hearing the sullenness in his own voice and not knowing how to stop it.

Ryn's expression did not change, her eyes intent on his face. "You are not well."

If she was worrying about him, was that a good sign? He couldn't tell by her demeanor. "No," Anakin began, "I'm fi -"

"I wasn't asking." She dropped to one knee in front of him, ignoring the soaked ground, and took his face in her hands. "Look at me."

He met her eyes.

Ryn stared into him for a long minute, searching. Then she closed her eyes and drew in a breath.

The exhale released something inside him, a tightness he hadn't known was aching, and she opened her eyes again. "Better?" she asked, not quite hiding a tremor.

He couldn't lie to Ryn. "What _was_ that?"

Ryn grimaced, letting him go. "I'm not sure. You were out of tune, but I don't know why."

"Out of tune?" Anakin said.

"Metaphor." Ryn stood, a little more slowly than usual - Anakin could the echoes of her fatigue, dragging at her - and tried to ineffectually to brush the mud from her knee. "The Jedi train their students to imagine the Force and individual essences as light. We speak of them as ... music. Harmony." She straightened, stretching, and frowned into the gray distance. "Everyone's song changes over time, but a discordance within usually means something's wrong." She shifted, returning her attention to him, her mind still closed to his touch. "Could be your worry for Obi-Wan, maybe. Let me know if it gets worse again."

Anakin watched her go without protest, not sure what he could say that would make anything better. He kept watching her anyway, following her with his eyes as she moved through the camp with strength, taking care of others. _Yeah, Obi-Wan's not the only one I'm worried about_.

In the West, another storm was building.


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction - okay, with a side of myth-making - and I am not making any profit from any of it.

Author's notes:

1)This chapter dedicated to LJ's attanagra, for thematic reasons.

2) If the advice Kit gives to Ryn is familiar, that's because it is substantially similar to the description of kingship the king gives to his son in C.S. Lewis's _The Horse and His Boy_. It stuck with me. If the other stuff in the chapter seems familiar, that's probably because it's a lot like _The Silmarillion_ crossed with Celtic hero cycles seasoned with a dash of Every Fairy Tale You've Ever Read Anywhere. Yeah, that's how I roll.

3) I'm still not happy with the third goddess's name. But here I try my hand at intertextual myth-making, and I hope you enjoy it …

**CHAPTER SIX**

Sarta turned from the balcony as his sister stepped out of the shadows behind.

"Have you felt it?" she asked him, her voice hushed.

Sarta looked out at the lowering clouds. "What does it mean?"

"Someone has raised the land."

He frowned at her over his shoulder. "Again I ask."

Gunryth frowned in turn. "The land itself is roused to anger: all the life on this planet." She took in his uncomprehending look and tried again: "There is a disturbance in the Force."

"Oh." Sarta looked at her. "And it's affecting the planet?"

"_No_," said Gunryth. A lesser woman would have been stamping her foot. "_Life creates the Force_."

"Right," said Sarta, not following at all.

"And now someone has raised Loreth to arms."

"Right," Sarta said again.

"Thereby causing a disturbance in the Force," Gunryth finished, watching him expectantly.

"So ..." Sarta prompted.

Gunryth looked a little wild around the eyes. "So we could lose the whole planet!"

Sarta blinked at her. "What?"

"Do you not _see_ that storm building?" She pointed across the hills to the south.

"Yes," said Sarta.

"That is happening all over Loreth," Gunryth said - sounding, for the first tie since he could remember, a little shaken. "It may be happening in the planetary core, for all I know. I told you, _Loreth is at war_."

He stared at her. "How is that even possible?"

"I don't know." Gunryth hovered on the verge of tears. "It was said the ancient _ylfe_ had that power, but ... I have never believed it."

"The gods," Sarta said, suppressing a tremor of fear.

"Hush," said Gunryth severely. "Don't call them that. But the Iluhari of old ... yes, that is possible."

Sarta sucked in a breath. "The only one left is ..."

Gunryth met his eyes. "Yes. I fear that, too."

"What ..." he cleared his throat. "What can we do? Have you spoken to our father?"

Gunryth's full lips twisted wryly. "It is easier to see forgiveness than permission, my brother."

Sarta resisted the urge to close his eyes in despair. It wasn't as if he hadn't _known_ her long enough to know better. "What do you want me to do?" he asked resignedly.

Gunryth smiled tightly. "Ride North," she commanded him. "Find Areth'ryn."

Sarta jerked in surprise. "_Ryn_? But -"

"I have a hunch," said Gunryth, effectively silencing his protests. "Take few men and ride hard. Don't look back."

_That's not ominous at all,_ Sarta thought, and left to do his sister's bidding.

* * *

><p>He'd been moved. Probably several times. But this time, when he opened his eyes and sat up, groaning, something was different.<p>

In the first place, his hands were bound, and this was the first time that had happened. But besides that ... the air felt different. There was a draught. And ... dampness.

Most important of all, he could sense the Force.

As a matter of fact, he could feel it almost _too much_. Instead of a steady stream, comforting in its presence, the Force charged through like a sudden flood, threatening to obliterate everything in its path. The sheer violence of it was intoxicating, dangerous.

_This is a very bad sign._

* * *

><p>Ryn groaned as she dragged herself from her blankets. It wasn't that said blankets were all that comfortable - they were soaked through and itchy on top of it - but the prospect of another day in the saddle held even less appeal. But the key to being a leader, Kit had always insisted, was not to be <em>better<em> than everyone else, it was to be more _willing_. Men - and presumably women - would follow you damn near anywhere if they knew you were heading there faster yourself.

_I could give you all kinds of advice,_ Kit had told her, years ago. _But none of it would mean a damn, except this: _there is no such thing as leading from behind._ Being a leader means _you_ take the risks. It means you head every doomed charge, and you act as rearguard in every faltering retreat. It means that whatever is dangerous and difficult and dirty, that's what you do more of than anyone else._ He'd grinned at her then, his fatalistic humor glimmering. _And eventually you'll get killed doing it, but it's not a bad way to go._

_See?_ Ryn thought now, scrambling to her feet. _I did listen. I am trying, Kit._

Except that she wasn't actually the first on her feet this morning. Anakin had beaten her to it and was already kneeling over the fire, keeping it sheltered from the wind and rain with the Force while he made the strong stimulant tea they carried on campaign.

Ryn squelched an irrational surge of resentment at being outdone - _it is _not_ a competition; you're on the same side, damn it_ - and made her way across the camp to him, assessing the shadows under is eyes so she couldn't think about anything else, like the way his hands moved over the tea equipment, strong and sure and steady.

"Hey," she said, when she was close enough to speak without rousing the others. "You're up early."

"Hey," Anakin answered. "I couldn't sleep." He glanced up at her, fingering a cup. "You take your tea straight, right?"

_I'd like to take _you_ straight,_ Ryn thought, and bit her lip against a rush of heat. _Cut it out, Orun. You sound like the heroine of a bad romance._

Anakin was still watching her expectantly.

_Right._

"Honey," she choked, because she needed all the calories she could get right now.

Anakin nodded, just the flicker of surprise on his unusually still face, and added a dollop of honey to the cup before pouring tea. "Here," he said, holding it out to her, and Ryn reached automatically to take it from him.

Their hands touched, and it felt like being struck by lightning, the crackle of energy as every nerve she had sprang to life.

_Stop that,_ she told herself sharply. _You've never been struck by lightning in the first place._

And then it registered that Anakin was still holding onto the cup, staring at their hands. Ryn tugged gently and he let go, still looking at little stunned.

_Okay,_ Ryn thought, looking away so she could _breathe_ again. _It wasn't just me. He felt it, too. That's new._

New, but not something any of them could afford to worry about right now. Ryn took a sip of the tea, closing her eyes as she felt the stimulant penetrate its way into her system.

_Do _not_ think about penetration._

"Did you get any rest at all last night?" she asked Anakin, searching for a distraction.

It might even work, provided Anakin had suddenly gone deaf, blind, and stupid.

"I ... yeah, a little," he said, regarding her warily.

_So that would be a 'no', then,_ Ryn surmised, discarding all hope of preserving her dignity. It had been on the critical list pretty much since she met him, anyway.

_You met him by splatting your ass all over the the Temple floor,_ she reminded herself acerbically. Nobody_ finds that impressive._

He was still staring at her, probably wondering when she'd lost her mind.

Ryn sipped her tea to buy some time, and finally came out with, "I think we could make a good sixty leagues today, if we push."

Anakin nodded slowly, watching her. "I have no idea what that means."

_Right._ Because the Republic didn't use leagues, and neither did the Hutts. "We'll reach the seal over the Womb of Death within the week," she summarized.

Anakin's eyes widened as his eyebrows went up. "The 'Womb of Death'?"

"We're a poetic people."

Anakin's expression told her without words what he thought of _that._ "What will we do when we get there?"

"Descend to the underworld, battle some demons, hopefully rescue Obi-Wan."

Anakin stared at her. "The _underworld_? Seriously? We're not living in some ... _myth_, Ryn."

"That's probably what the heroes of the myths thought, too," Ryn pointed out. He looked frustrated, so she took a breath and tried to explain. "Loreth is a very ... _real_ ... kind of place," she said, but that clearly made no sense to Anakin. _Okay. Try this again ..._ "You know how Yoda says that 'luminous beings are we'?" she asked, and waited for his nod. "Think of Loreth as a place ... a point of convergence, if you like ... where matter and energy and spirit are less separate than what you know." He was listening to her now, at least. "I am more _present_ - in every sense of the word; more _here_, more _now_, than anyone else you will ever meet."

Anakin watched her for a moment, then cast his eyes across the sleeping figures of the camp. "Evinne?"

Ryn shook her head. "No. We share much ancestry, but ... the old line runs strong in me." She looked to the East, feeling the change in her bones. "I am one of the old kind, and we are dying out." The wind of dawn stirred her hair and spat rain in her face; it felt like a sign. "The gods will not walk among us, after this."

There was a clatter; Ryn jerked her eyes away from the future to find that Anakin had dropped his own teacup in to the fire, dousing some of the flames.

"I - wha - I'm sorry," he managed, retrieving the metal cup from the ash with the help of the Force. "Did you just say ... the _gods_?"

_Oh. Right. Well._

"It's a long story," Ryn said, knowing that wasn't much of an answer. "We are dying. But we have to try and save the galaxy first, one last time."

"_We?_" Anakin said, his eyes too sharp. "Who's _we_?"

Ryn inhaled slowly. "The Guardians of Loreth, the few who are left of us."

Anakin was not taking this news well. "You're telling me you are a _god_?"

"Descendant," Ryn said wearily. She took another hit of her tea for fortification. "So is Evinne, really, it's just that -"

"She didn't inherit whatever god-stuff you inherited."

"I'm not sure I'd put it like that. She inherited _something, _after all. But ... close enough, I guess."

"And you don't think you might have mentioned this a little _sooner_?"

"No," Ryn said, gazing at him over the rim of her cup, "I really don't."

"Ryn, you don't - you can't - the gods aren't _real_.'

Ryn sipped again. "I'm real enough."

"But -"

"It's a pretty rough translation," she said, and felt something ease inside him - _notagod_ - so she kept going. "They were powerful beings, and some of the ancients worshipped them. You've heard of them before; these days we call them Powers or Saints."

"I've heard you say both," Anakin said. "At once, I mean. Powers-and-Saints. I thought it was a curse."

"No, they're different, it's ..." Ryn tightened her grip on the metal cup, trying to find the words. "They were the Guardians of Loreth, as I said. They were not creators, but they were caretakers. Sort of ... deputies, I guess you could say. And the Saints, originally, were the heroes who were raised after death to join them. But ... the ancient _ylfe_, long ago, lost their way, and began to worship the Guardians in their own right, instead of honoring them as emissaries of the Lifegiver. And some of the Guardians betrayed their duty, and accepted the worship, and became not guides but rulers, demanding tribute." She cast another glance at the sky. "The first of the _athelani_."

"And those were ... your ancestors?" Anakin guessed warily.

"No ... well, in a way. The true Guardians tried to make it right. Three were chosen to go among the _ylfe_ and teach them the old ways again. But ... it didn't quite work."

"The people didn't believe them?"

Ryn grimaced. "Khalî was one of the three."

"Ouch."

"Yeah. The others - Vashtu and Arret - failed to restrain her. Vashtu couldn't exactly _nurture_ Khalî into submission, and Arret, who should have been the warrior ... had other priorities."

"What happened?"

Ryn tore her gaze from the sky and let it rest on him, carrying the weight of inherited duty. "She fell in love," Ryn answered softly. "With a hero."

"And that meant she couldn't fight herself?" Anakin sounded skeptical.

"She didn't want to fight. She loved her hero more than anything; too much. She made herself as one of the _ylfe_ for him, let herself be bound in her flesh to love him better." Ryn couldn't hold his gaze; she spoke her last words into the fire instead. "She forsook her duty, and chose him over Loreth."

Anakin's touch on her wrist startled her; she almost dropped her cup. "Ryn," he said, tugging gently until she looked up and met his eyes, reluctantly. "You're not like her. You're not Arret. You're _not._"

"I never said ..." The look in his eyes stopped her, the unwanted insight, the knowledge of everything she _hadn't_ said. "All right, fine, I'm not." She pulled her hand away to scrub the tears from her face and pretend they were only rain. "But I'll need to be, if I have to go head-to-head with Khalî."

"You're a good person," Anakin told her, his earnestness heartbreaking. "The _best_ person I know. You'll do the right thing."

_Some days I don't even know what that is._ Ryn looked back at him, meaning to point out that his faith in her was a little alarming, but ... "I love you," she said, before she could stop herself.

Anakin favored her with a slightly sad smile, his presence awash with the bittersweetness of them. "I know."

He took her breath away, kneeling there in the rain.

_No. No no no no no no no no._ "I ... I have to go," Ryn said brokenly, and shoved her empty cup into his hands, hurrying off as though she could run away from her own feelings.

As though anything could save her now.


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, from which I am not making any profit.

Author's note: Battles, myths, and hallucinations … Also, thanks to the lovely people who gave me feedback last time! You are rewarded (or punished) with another long and eventful chapter!

**CHAPTER SEVEN**

"There is a disturbance in the Force."

Dooku's hologram inclines its head. "I have felt it, my Master."

_You probably thought it was indigestion,_ Sidious thinks uncharitably.

Well. He does everything uncharitably, so perhaps that's no great surprise. Still. He's feeling positively waspish today.

He is a Dark Lord of the Sith; instead of squashing those feelings, or allowing them to annoy him in their inconvenience, he draws on them, letting them swell like the dark blush of fetid arousal.

"Lord Tyranus, this disturbance is not of our design."

"No, my lord." Tyranus sounds suspiciously as though he feels his agreement might carry some weight with his Master.

"But it may prove useful to us," Sidious continues.

"As you say, my lord."

_Pompous ass._ Well, he'd known when he accepted Dooku as an apprentice that the man's delusional belief in _inherited_ gentility - namely his own - would prove an irritant. "Lord Tyranus, my work keeps me here, on Coruscant."

"A troubling necessity, my lord."

"No, my apprentice, it troubles me not," Sidious chides him, letting a silky edge of chastisement grace his tone. "For I have you to assist me in our mutual travails, have I not?"

Dooku's eyes widen, just slightly, at the threat unspoken behind his words. "Assuredly, my Master. What is thy bidding?"

_Much better._ "Go to the Outer Rim," Sidious instructs him. "Discover the source of this disturbance, but let none guess at your presence there. Then report back to me."

The Count of Serenno bows in acquiescence. "It shall be done, my Master."

(Lord Vader, years later, is the only one to say, over and over again, _as you wish_.)

* * *

><p>Sarta hoists himself higher in the saddle and cranes his neck to survey the terrain through the gathering storm.<p>

"Scouts?" his lieutenant suggests, not for the first time.

Sarta shakes his head as he settles back into normal riding position, much to his mount's relief. "No need," he tells her tersely. "Nothing to see." He doesn't say - doesn't _have_ to say - that the real danger now is the kind that can't be seen. There's nothing they can do about it from here, anyway.

They change mounts at the first fort and keep riding.

* * *

><p>There is noise, filtering down through the passageways: voices, the tramp of feet, the distant sound of running water. Obi-Wan feels fairly safe in hazarding that he is in some sort of system of caves.<p>

The air is chill, dank and drafty rather than warm and stale, so probably they are not far underground. That's good, he tells himself at regular intervals. But it's hard to feel cheerful about much of anything when the background noises of the caves are punctuated by long-drawn screams.

Whatever they have holding the bars across the opening of his own cell, they resist his use of the Force. Drawing on it earned him a beating the last time, from some scaly being with fetid breath whose species Obi-Wan couldn't identify. Not humanoid, for certain, and he doesn't think Trandoshan or Rodian, either, but that's not much to go on.

So most of the time he lies still in the dark and dreams of Anakin, even when technically he's awake.

Sometimes the draughts of air smell like blood.

* * *

><p>It was near midday by the time Anakin finally nudged his sleipnir closer to Ryn's to ask her the question that had been bothering him since breakfast.<p>

Ryn caught his look and sent the warriors riding near her a sharp glance that made them fall back and leave some space. "Yes?" she asked, terse but not unfriendly.

"So." Anakin shifted in his saddle. "How are you going to use your special god powers to rescue Obi-Wan?" _And how come you haven't been using them to get out of messes up to now?_

Ryn kept her gaze focused straight ahead. "I don't have any special god powers."

"But you said -"

"My birthright is a connection to this land, and a duty to defend it." Ryn tightened her grip on the reins in a way that said, all too clearly, that he was _not getting it_. "It runs strong in me, that's true. But that doesn't make me powerful, not in the way you mean. You've already seen everything I can do." She twitched irritably. "The Adepts at the Temple couldn't even teach me to use the Force properly. I failed their tests three times before they gave up and sent me to learn fighting instead." She drew a sharp, unhappy breath. "I was pretty good at that part, at least."

_You wanted to be a Healer,_ Anakin thought at her. _And you were good at that, too._ But arguing with Ryn about her past was like arguing with Obi-Wan about Jedi rules, or trying to explain to Watto that it wasn't his fault the coolant valves had blown once again: being right wouldn't earn him any points. So he set his teeth and tried to move on: "Your empathy -"

"Has been useful _when_?"

_Okay._ Anakin tried hard not to strangle her. "So what _is_ the plan, exactly? I mean, why tell me all that god stuff?"

"Because it is ... significant," Ryn answered slowly. "Thanks to the Guardians - and the _athelani_ - Loreth is not like any other place you know." She frowned. "Unless you've been to Korriban."

"_Korriban?_"

"Never mind that, it's not really the same." She took a deep breath. "It's like this: I inherited duty, not power. The same goes for all the _athelani_, those who survive. Our strength lies in our connection to this land, so we rely on it pretty heavily." She cut him a quick, sideways glance. "You may have noticed, I'm not all that impressive off-world."

"You're impressive," Anakin said, remembering the girl he'd thought he'd known. "You're Ryn Orun. That's pretty stanging impressive."

Ryn didn't quite roll her eyes. "Thanks."

That didn't seem to be going anywhere, so Anakin circled back to his earlier question: "So how is all this going to help us save Obi-Wan?"

Ryn grimaced. "Well, we managed to raise the land against Khalî, for a start."

Anakin glanced around at the - yes, decidedly angry - landscape. "I'm still not sure how that helps us," he said, feeling a little bitter about the excessive rain.

Ryn exhaled slowly. "If we've done it right, it _may_ disrupt Khalî's own connection to Loreth's ecosystem."

_Patience,_ said a voice that sounded suspiciously like Obi-Wan's. _I'm trying,_ Anakin thought, carefully unclenching his jaw. "And that will ..."

"Impair her awareness of things, weaken her powers." Ryn gave the hills a somewhat dubious look of her own. "Maybe." She shook herself and got back to the explanation. "Evinne and I together are still no match for her. But with the Force ... you might be."

_The Chosen One again,_ Anakin thought. He sensed ... something ... behind her statement, but he was way over his limit on Lorethan mysticism for the day, so he ignored that. "And if I'm not?"

Ryn shrugged. "I don't have a backup plan."

"That's ... not very reassuring," Anakin pointed out.

"For me, either," Ryn agreed. She sounded ... tired.

Anakin blew out a breath. _I hate this planet_. Obi-Wan would tell him that was irrational, that it wasn't the planet's fault, and he needed to release his feelings into the Force. _But I want Ryn back. _My_ Ryn_. Ryn who was sharp and funny and kind _and loved me_, not this stranger who didn't even seem to care about anything that mattered. Just her myths and her land and her damn _duty_, whatever that was.

_You can't _inherit_ your duty,_ Anakin thought at her. _You take care of people because you love them, not because your ancestors did something wrong._ But Ryn didn't listen to him any more. So he sucked it up and asked, "So how do we find Obi-Wan?"

Ryn made a face, not a good sign. "If you can't feel him yet, I suspect it must be because someone is dampening his signature. That could be Khalî herself, of course, but ... I doubt it."

"The sorceress's apprentice," Anakin guessed. "The one who ran away with Omega."

"Probably."

"So ... we have to find the sorceress first."

Ryn lifted one corner of her mouth. "And I do have a plan for that."

"Finally," Anakin muttered under his breath. Louder, he said, "So tell me."

* * *

><p>Ryn tries, but it still sounds a little shaky to Anakin. Her plan, so far as he understands it, is to locate the entrance to this Womb of Death - she keeps calling it the underworld, but the best Anakin can tell, it's actually a network of caves, permeated by Khalî's dark energy: a sort of Dark Side Ilum, without the crystals - in pretty much the same way starship scanners locate black holes: by sensing the energy as it's drained away. After that, she says, they'll have to fight their way into some kind of underground temple.<p>

"We have stories," Ryn says finally. "But they're all from thousands of years ago, before humans ever came to this planet. They're mangled and confusing and even if they were clear, there's no guarantee that Khalî's lair is now as it was then."

"_That's_ encouraging," Anakin says, not very graciously.

"I can't change history," Ryn points out, with exaggerated patience. "It's not _my_ fault that -"

But she never gets the chance to tell him what wasn't her fault, because suddenly she tenses, and a shout behind them sounds the alarm: "Dhraghol!"

* * *

><p>"What?" said Anakin, and Ryn leaned in the saddle to point past him to the East.<p>

"_Dhraghol_," she repeated, the word guttural in her steady voice. "Flying demons."

Obi-Wan would probably have said that there were no such things as demons. (He'd initially been skeptical of the angels on the moons of Iego, too.) But Obi-Wan wasn't here, and the monsters looked real enough.

"What do we do?" he shouted to Ryn.

"Hold your lightsaber over your head!" she answered, already activating hers. "They don't like light."

"Will a lightsaber kill them?"

"If you get a good hit."

There were a fair number of archers in the party, hunters who had been trained to take their prey in the ancient way, and they flanked the others now, bowstrings singing in the failing rain.

Several of the oncoming dhraghol fell, but the others came on undeterred, heedless of their companions. Anakin could hear Ryn cursing, a steady susurration under the shrieking cries of their attackers.

They swept low, monstrous creatures like dark, overgrown mynocks with giant claws and gaping maws in place of sucking mouths.

"_Shit_," said Ryn, with feeling. "Anakin, I have to -" She cut herself off and shouted an order at a nearby Lorethan: _stay close to Skywalker!_

Anger rose in his throat at being dismissed like a child, but there was no _time_, for anything. Ryn was already riding away, fanning out with other warriors armed with lightsabers, forming a vanguard as the dhraghol swooped in for another pass.

"Watch them!" the Lorethan next to him shouted, and Anakin couldn't do anything else.

The vanguard moved as one, kicking out of their stirrups to stand upright on the saddle. Ryn led the charge, reins dangling loosely from one hand as she balanced on the sleipnir's moving back, lightsaber held aloft.

They took the onslaught head-on, lightsabers shearing through deadly arcs overhead, scorching their way through pungent flesh.

"Fall back!" Ryn shouted, her voice threading through the tumult as the dhraghol wheeled again. "Fall back to Skywalker's position and regroup!"

And then they were all around him, a churning sea of sleipniri and hard-eyed Lorethans, some of them still doing the balancing act.

"I don't need to be protected!" Anakin snapped at Ryn as she came in range.

She shook her head as she dropped back into the saddle. "_Force_."

It took him a second to realize that wasn't a curse, but an explanation: Ryn was pointing frantically in the direction of the oncoming dhraghol.

He barely gathered his concentration in time to deflect any of the creatures, but at least now he could see what she wanted. Well, sort of. Ryn was already wheeling her mount and shouting orders to form the vanguard again, while the other Lorethans raised whatever weapons they had and crowded as close to Anakin as they possibly could.

This time when the frontrunners broke the force of the dharghol's dive, Anakin was ready. He threw the Force at the survivors, hurling them backward, throwing them off-course. It was harder to do with living beings than with objects, but the dhraghol were not particularly intelligent or strong-willed, and the Force was everywhere.

They spun from this unexpected resistance, sweeping back into the warriors ...

... and then one caught Ryn, practically in her face. Distracted, trying to reach a warrior who was having trouble with his mount, she didn't react quickly enough. She took the force of the dhraghol's clumsy charge straight in her chest and stumbled, dropping her lightsaber.

She grabbed for her sword, but the dhraghol was faster. It seized her in its huge talons, pinning her sword arm to her side as Ryn flailed uselessly.

"_Ryn!_" Anakin heard himself scream. It seemed only fair; other people all around him were shouting variations on the same theme. "No! _Ryn_..."

The vanguard faltered, uncertain, not knowing how to help their leader or whether they should try.

Evinne was shouting orders, taking charge, but Anakin couldn't hear anything but the dhraghol's shrieking, couldn't see anything but Ryn's pale, despairing face.

"Cover me!" he yelled, and kneed his mount through the ranks as startled sleipniri shuffled aside to make way. And then he was in the clear, galloping to where the dhraghol struggled to make off with its prey - while Ryn, still tethered to her sleipnir by the reins caught around one wrist, made increasingly weaker attempts to get away.

It was impossible to find a vital mark amidst the beating wings: if he aimed for a killing stroke, he would hit Ryn. So instead Anakin raised himself in the stirrups, stretched ... and sheared of one of those foul-smelling, hideous wings.

The creature screamed, an ear-rending sound, dropping its prey as it fell. Anakin kneed his mount closer, to finish it off -

and Ryn's frightened sleipnir took off, dragging her by the reins.

Evinne formed the vanguard again, somewhere behind him, and charged once more; as she passed, Anakin could hear her screaming at him in frustration, but he couldn't make out the words.

And then she was running down Ryn's mount, grabbing the reins and dragging it into a turn, back toward the main force.

The dhraghol attacked again, but they were weakening; the Lorethan vanguard broke their force with ease this time, and the dhraghol wheeled uncertainly in the air, fetid with their stink.

Evinne hauled Ryn's sleipnir behind the line and dropped from her saddle to kneel beside her friend's body in the muck. "Shorty?" she asked, reaching out to touch Ryn's shoulder. "Shorty, can you hear me?"

A shriek in the air made their mounts dance; Evinne looked up and locked eyes with Anakin. "Get rid of those things!" she snapped, the recrimination in her gaze scorching.

Ryn was already struggling painfully to her knees; Anakin turned his attention to the approaching dhraghol, throwing them back again with the Force.

This time it broke them for good. They swept around in no very good order and beat their wings heavily, shrieking into the distance as suddenly as they had appeared.

Evinne hauled Ryn to her feet, where she stood shuddering with pain, one hand pressed to her abdomen as blood welled past her fingers.

"Come on," Evinne said, not ungently. "You need to get that tended."

"Soon." Ryn spat blood and spoke again, more clearly: "Give us a minute, will you?"

Evinne nodded and turned back to the others, leading both their mounts. Ryn stepped closer to Anakin, swaying on her feet, practically shaking with fury.

"_What the hell were you thinking?_" she demanded, keeping her voice down so the rest of the war-band could not hear.

"You were in trouble," Anakin said, startled. "I _saved_ you! I -"

"_No,_" Ryn hissed, pressing her hand tighter against the wound in her side. "You do not risk lives to save me, _ever_." Anakin started to speak and she cut him off, ruthless. "_Ever_." She drew a breath, paling a little as it pulled at her injuries. "This isn't like being with Obi-Wan," she went on, hoarsely, her fury fading. "If the two of you are on a mission and you drop everything to save him ... it may all still turn out okay, because it's just the two of you, and you've got each other's backs." She breathed in again, looking a little sick. "But in a war-band, it's different. Your duty is to hold your own ground first. Help the guy next to you if you can. But if you go charging off after someone else ... you weaken the whole defense. I need to know ... I can count on you ... to hold the line." She was forcing the words out between clenched teeth now, her face white with pain.

"You _can_, Ryn," Anakin insisted. "We didn't lose. You can count on me, I'll -" _always be there for you,_ but she didn't let him say it, shaking her head.

"We got lucky," she told him quietly. She nodded at the war-band, standing around awkwardly and pretending not to watch them. "In a real fight, against something more dangerous than dhraghol ... we could have lost the entire force." She looked up at him, her face streaked with mud and rain. "I love you, Anakin. The gods help me, I do. But I need to know I can _trust_ you."

She limped off without waiting for his response.

* * *

><p>"I'm fine," Ryn told the Healer, trying to hold still for the examination.<p>

"You have a puncture wound to the abdomen and a dislocated shoulder," the Healer answered, unimpressed. "That's not fine."

She wasn't lying. Restoring her shoulder joint to its traditional location produced a wave of pain so intense it threw Ryn forward, retching helplessly. She heard herself scream, and then someone - _Evinne_ - was thrusting a flask between her teeth.

The alcohol burned its way down, potent, and Ryn pulled back, gasping, to glare at her. "You couldn't have given me that _first_?"

"I didn't know you were going to _hurl_ on us," Evinne said testily. "Take another swig, we've got the stomach wound yet."

Ryn fought back a wave of nausea and did as she was told.

Then they took the flask back and poured it in the wound, and Ryn couldn't help it: she screamed again, struggling uselessly - _Skywalker,_ hold_ her_ - and she recognized the sharp tang of Anakin's sweat as the darkness surged up and dragged her under.

* * *

><p>She woke slowly, to failing light and a taste in her mouth that suggested they'd given her something else, after the alcohol. They had moved, while she was unconscious; the shape of the hills was unfamiliar, and Ryn was still lying prone on a makeshift travois.<p>

_That's a lot, for a little claw-mark,_ Ryn thought, briefly embarrassed, and then discarded the feeling. There was nothing she could do about it now, anyway.

Carefully she flattened her good hand to the ground beside her and tried to rise, inducing a wave of dizziness that swirled in her head and her gut and her limbs, dragging her back down. She lay still and prayed she wouldn't be sick again and choke to death on her own vomit.

"Easy," a familiar voice said, and Ryn's heart leapt in response. "You've had a rough time. Just lie still."

Something niggled at the back of her mind, a reason why this particular voice shouldn't be so reassuring. But remembering was too hard, and Ryn settled back against the travois and let her eyes drift shut.

"Anakin," she said decisively. The name set off all sorts of jangling alarms, but Ryn ignored them, because it also felt _good_. There was heat and light and safety, and she reached for it -

Only to have her hand caught in a warm, steady grasp. "I'm here," Anakin's voice said again. "I've got you. How are you feeling?"

That was a depressing question. "Gurgh," Ryn decided, and tugged her hand free so she could touch him better. He was more interesting than the pain, anyway. "Lots of babies."

"Uh," said Anakin. "Babies?"

"Mmm," Ryn agreed, running her hand up the inside of his thigh, feeling the strength there. _Oh._ She wriggled a little, just in the hips, and heard herself moan.

"Uh, Ryn," Anakin said, capturing her hand again, "I don't think ..."

This felt important, although she couldn't exactly remember why. Ryn pried her eyes open - somewhat reluctantly - and blinked until she could bring his face into focus. "God, you're pretty," she said fondly, although she was pretty sure she'd been trying to say something else ...

"Ryn ..."

_Oh. Right._ She squinted up at him through the haze, watching as the last rays of the setting sun kindled his hair to golden flame, the reckless young hero of a thousand legends, and felt the recognition settle into her bones even though she'd tried so hard to run away. _You, I love you, it's always been you._ "I don't have any maternal instincts," she warned him, remembering. Some other voice, long ago: _Areth'ryn, you're not made for love._ "But I want to have your babies." There; now he knew. Maybe he could fix her. Anakin was good at fixing things; maybe he would fix her so she could be good at love. "Is that ... wrong?"

"No," said Anakin. He sounded choked, like it was hard for him to speak. "It's not wrong, Ryn, but ... I can't."

_Oh._ Ryn's heart gave one hard little thud of acknowledgement. Maybe she was so broken that nobody could fix her. But Anakin felt ... upset, like maybe his heart was thudding, too. And there was something wrong with his face: it kept twisting, and it was wet.

_He's crying,_ she thought, perplexed: if she was the one who was broken, why was _Anakin_ crying?

It hit her in a sudden flash of memory: standing in a lift at the Temple, teasing him about -

"It's okay," she told him. "You can't fix everything."

Anakin cried harder, until it made him breathe funny. "You need help," he told her, which Ryn knew was true because everything hurt so much. "And I _will_ fix this, Ryn. Somehow. I promise."

_You can't fix me,_ Ryn thought, listening to him yell for Evinne. _I'm too broken. In too many places._ Maybe there were places where she didn't even have places any more. That would explain why she felt so empty.

"Ryn, just ... hold on, okay? Help is coming. And I'm right here, I'm going to take care of you ..."

She wanted to shake her head, but it was too heavy. "I fell in love," she whispered, trying to make him understand - the words in Basic strangely right, for once saying exactly what she felt, "and it was a long way down."

"Shhh," Anakin answered, holding her hand tighter. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Ryn..."

"It's not your fault," she tried to explain, _I got broken,_ but her voice didn't sound right, and Anakin was still crying.

"Ryn, just hang on, it's going to be ..."

She opened her mouth to tell Anakin that it was okay, it wasn't his fault - _I know you tried, I know you tried to fix me _- but the darkness was coming again, and she was too tired to fight it this time.

"_Kainen_," she mumbled wearily, and let go.


	8. Chapter 8

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

Author's note: a short chapter that points toward (hopefully) greater things. I would love to get your feedback!

* * *

><p><strong>CHAPTER EIGHT<strong>

Something is happening. The Force doesn't give him any specifics, muddy and dark at the edge of his perceptions, but that he can feel it at all is a change. Anakin's presence is still out of reach, but if Obi-Wan can feel the Force now, then maybe his apprentice's stronger connection will be able to find him. It is a tenuous hope, but it is better than nothing. In the meantime, all he can do is wait.

Slowly he becomes aware of a presence beside his own, unlike Omega, whom he couldn't sense anyway, his void in the Force. Unlike, also, the overpowering dark entity that controls this place, whose will permeates everything he can touch. It takes him a long time - minutes, hours, more; he doesn't know - before he begins to sense something, a nagging familiarity, about this new presence. He can't quite place it: something at once young and old, the strength of defeat without surrender. Resistance without hope.

_Ryn?_ he queries, reaching out, but it isn't Ryn, and the presence flinches away from him in surprise.

* * *

><p>The voice comes in his dreams: <em>help me. Please help me.<em>

Obi-Wan reaches for the voice, but he finds only darkness. _Who are you?_

Sobbing. _Please help me. The empty one, he lies._ The darkness ... shifts, a cascade of controlled power ... and he sees a figure coalesce in the center of his field of vision, trailing curling edges of dark mist. The face is familiar, though the eyes are gray and remote. _Ryn?_ Tears track their way down her young face, ageless now.

_Help me, young one. You are my only hope._

The vision melts away, and he is lying facedown on cold stone. It isn't, can't be, but he can't help asking: _Ryn?_

The darkness does not answer. _You are my only hope._

* * *

><p>Ryn woke up, carefully assessed her situation, and concluded almost immediately that consciousness had been a very bad idea. She tried to sit up anyway and got a sickening headache for her efforts.<p>

"Ahhh..."

"Easy," said a voice she knew in her bones, and suddenly Ryn felt a warm arm around her shoulders, supporting her.

_Anakin._ She turned her head cautiously to the left and twitched feebly as a skinny golden braid fell across her face. "...n'kin?" she croaked, voice cracking painfully.

"I'm here, Ryn." He held her tighter. "You're going to be okay."

That sounded doubtful, but Ryn let it go for now. "Where are we?"

"You're asking me?" Anakin shrugged, shifting her against his shoulder. His body heat felt ridiculously good in the cold and damp, but Ryn gave her best effort to ignoring that. "Somewhere northeast of where we were attacked by the _dhraghol_. Maybe fifteen kilometers, and I'm not sure how many of your leagues."

"Not enough." Ryn pulled away from him, with a pang of regret for his warmth, to sit gingerly upright. "We have to make better time than this. Something is happening."

"Something is happening?" Anakin repeated, and with a few extra inches of distance his features resolved into an anxious frown. "To Obi-Wan?"

"To Loreth," Ryn replied. _I think._ "The hills are afraid."

"_What?_"

"I don't know how to explain," Ryn said, struggling to get her feet under her. "But we have to move again, tonight."

"You need rest -"

"Rest won't help me if we don't take care of this." The conviction of urgency that had awakened her ran stronger now, burning in her bones. She squinted into Anakin's face as she steadied herself, watching the shadows of a camp fire some distance away throw his familiar features into relief; the sun had set while she had been unconscious. "It's important, Anakin. I can feel it."

He nodded reluctantly. "You almost died."

"I'll be all right," Ryn said. "But we have to _move_, right away."

His signature felt ... uncertain. "Okay," he said slowly. "But ... stay here, okay? I'm going to get Evinne."

Ryn wasn't sure she could have gone anywhere under her own power if her life had depended on it, so she just nodded. "Don't waste time."

But Anakin hesitated. "Ryn, I ..."

"What?"

He swallowed audibly. "Nothing. I just ... I'm glad you're all right."

Bits and pieces of their last conversation floated back to her, wrapped in their drug-induced haze. _I told you I wanted to have your babies. Force help me._ Ryn managed a smile, hoping it didn't look quite as sick as she felt. "Yeah," she rasped. "Thanks."

* * *

><p>He could feel it now, resolving from a nebulous stir in the Force to a definite center of dark energy, building rotation.<p>

Navigating by currents in the Force is a difficult and hazardous procedure. Few people had ever managed it successfully, and even the slightest miscalculation would almost certainly mean death. Dooku, Lord Tyranus, drew on the surety of his own mastery - _your focus determines your reality_ - and imposed his will on the fabric of the universe itself, demanding its complaisance.

In the space between heartbeats, he engaged the hyperdrive.

* * *

><p>The blue-green energy nexus of a planet hung suspended in his viewscreen, surrounded by its three pale moons like a bridal necklace. Kirhiah'nuruodo checked his readouts again and hit the intercom. "Sir? You asked to be updated of any unusual activity on the planet of the godlings?"<p>

"Is that a question or a statement, Lieutenant?"

"Er. A ... statement, sir."

"Then why are you telling me my own orders?"

"Sir! Because I have something to report, sir."

"Then kindly report it and go back to your duties."

"Sir, yes sir!" Kirhiah'nuruodo took a deep breath. "I'm reading an energy spike, sir. Storms building over the planet's surface - the _whole_ planet, sir - and an elevated level of tectonic activity within the crust."

"How elevated?" The commander's voice was sharp.

"Sir, if my calculations are correct ... the planet is going to tear itself apart."

There was a brief silence, and then: "How long, Lieutenant?"

"Hard to say, sir. At the current rate four, maybe five of the planet's own rotations."

"Thank you, Lieutenant. That will be all."

"Sir - yes, sir." Kirhiah'nuruodo deactivated the intership comm and looked back at his small viewscreen, at the beautiful planet that was trying to destroy itself.

_Nerowe, may your goddess protect you._


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer: **George Lucas owns Star Wars. I am not making any profit from this work of fan fiction.

**Author's note: **Look! I learned a handy technique for indicating talking-in-someone-else's-head. You put the text between colons! Totally saw it in _Doctrine of Labyrinths_. Okay, yeah, my news is … not newsworthy. On to the fic!

* * *

><p><strong>CHAPTER NINE<strong>

"_Damn_ it, Ryn, you're supposed to _prevent_ shit like this!" Evinne growled into the dirt. Anakin craned his neck to shoot her a cautious glance.

"You know she can't hear you, right?"

"I bet she gets the general idea." Evinne leaned over the mound of dirt to lob a wad of the tarry substance the Lorethans were using on their weapons and flinched back down as it burst into flame. "_Orun!_ Your mother shot so crooked -"

There was a boom as someone else's fireball hit something more explosive.

"Cover me!" yelled Ryn's voice.

"What the -"

Several Lorethan archers answered; arrows sang as Ryn leaped into the right edge of Anakin's vision, sprinting toward the center of the Bolg line in a zigzag pattern that danced around incoming fire like a kid jumping rope.

She whipped a sling around her head and let loose, hitting the dirt and dropping out of Anakin's field of vision.

Slimy bits of liquefying Bolg spattered the ground around them; Anakin saw a particularly nasty clump catch Evinne square on the nose. She went cross-eyed, staring at it in distaste, and then practically deafened Anakin giving the order to move out.

"_GO! Go go __**GO!**_"

Ryn caught up with them as they reached the sleipniri, waiting with five members of the band. "Did we lose anybody?"

"Just our dignity," Evinne reported sourly. "For fuck's sake, _warn_ me the next time you're about to try a stunt like that."

"No promises." Ryn threw herself into the saddle and caught the reins. "Let's not waste daylight."

They heeled their mounts and took off again.

* * *

><p>"Sir, I have the, er, the king of Loreth on the com."<p>

"Excellent, Lieutenant. Let me speak with him."

* * *

><p>The first wave of the earthquake lifted Sarta from his saddle and flung him free, sailing through the air in an oddly peaceful silence.<p>

Then he hit the ground, and everything hurt.

He reached for his connection to the planet, the sense of _belonging_ that tied him here, to soothe the troubled land, but he found ... _nothing_. Or no response, anyway. The trees screamed out in fear and pain as they were torn from the living earth, but they did not heed his call.

It felt like ... something, but for a long time he could not remember what. Then he saw the sleipniri running wild and his men chasing them, and ...

_Of course,_ he thought dully. _Stampede. _

The thunder rolled overhead.

* * *

><p>Battered and bleeding, they ran for their lives.<p>

It was a race against time now. The things she and Evinne had set in motion could not be undone. They would reach Khalî and end her hold on the depths of their home planet, or they would die trying. And either way, it would be _soon_.

Ryn lost her breath for an instant as she dropped into the saddle again, her face and hands spattered with the thick blood of the Dhraghol pack whose survivors now dwindled into the distance.

"That's three attacks in two days," Merach said, glancing nervously down their backtrail.

Ryn nodded, still trying to catch her breath. "We're getting close."

Anakin passed by to her right, tired and filthy and brave, and Ryn's heart gave a sharp, painful little twist that bit deeper than her healing wounds.

"We have to _live_ to finish the journey," said Merach.

"We've made it this far." Ryn refused to look back at Anakin, wouldn't ask if he was looking for her, _only pain there_ ... "Tell Makesh to take point. I'm going ahead to scout."

"Your wounds -"

"Are healing. Go."

She titled her head up, eyes closed, and let the dying rain sluice off the worst of the filth.

_Soldier up, Orun._

Anakin's voice, behind her, asking someone about the territory ahead, and her heart twisted again.

What was it Loron had said?

_Passion, yet serenity._

"I hear you, Greatfather."

She kneed her mount and swung off, keeping her head head down beneath the ridge.

* * *

><p>"Fool," said the commander mildly. "It is clear that he will let his planet be destroyed, rather than accept our help. Lieutenant, have you had any luck pinpointing the source of the disturbance?"<p>

"Not yet, sir."

"Shame. Ensign!"

"S - sir!"

"See if you can find me someone in their government a little less suicidally independent."

"Sir!"

"And kindly learn to accept an order without _barking_ at me."

The ensign blushed furiously. "Yes, sir."

* * *

><p>The sense of dark power, the ecstasy of destruction barely held in check, is intoxicating. Dooku takes a deep breath, reaches for the controls, and ...<p>

"Unidentified alien vessel. This is Lieutenant-Adept Deirdriu Orun. Please respond."

* * *

><p>The presence whispers against the edges of his mind. :<em>Help me.:<em>

It gives him Ryn's face again, Ryn's face with eyes clouded by despair. _:Help me.:_

Obi-Wan sits up, tries to separate the presence from the general darkness and only marginally succeeds. "Who are you?"

It's hard to be sure, but it almost seems as if the entity at the heart of the darkness is ... confused.

A jumble of images rushes by, too fast to catch.

:_Death. Destruction. Despair.:_

Obi-Wan cannot hide a shudder. "Why should I help you?"

:_Help you. Slay the Empty One.:_

"The Empty One?"

Confusion again, but the sense of ... lack, of _void_, is clear.

_That _has_ to be Omega._

_:Help me?:_

"What do you want?"

The entity shows him a starless night.

"I don't understand."

_:Help me,:_ the thing says pitifully.

Voices, coming closer. The entity fades back into the darkness of the Force around him, present but indistinct.

"... cannot break him faster, an thou wilt have him sane." A Lorethan accent, stronger than Ryn's and speaking an unfamiliar dialect of Basic.

"I don't need him sane, as long as his connection to the Force is undamaged."

"All beings are connected. Thou dost not -"

"The Jedi have special abilities. You have felt this."

The Lorethan voice, a woman's, hisses impatiently. "Thou hast sworn to make offering. The dark goddess will not wait forever for her prize."

"You know I care not for your heathen rituals. Feed her another of your ghouls, or have an orgy, or whatever it is you do."

"Ssss! Do not mock what dost not understand."

"My apologies." The insincerity is rank in Omega's voice. "Appease your deity however you see fit." His tone hardens sharply: "And prepare for the ritual that will invest me with her power. But the Jedi is _mine_, you understand?"

"I do understand."

"Good." Footsteps, of a man with boots and a light tread, fading quickly away.

"Ssss." The Lorethan voice again: "Heard that, young Jedi?"

Obi-Wan catches his breath, just a second's hesitation. "A little."

"He does not understand the nature of our dark goddess. Do you?"

"I cannot say that I do."

A scent past his face, the stench of blood. "She _ends_ things."

"How charming."

"Some things need ending. Maybe even you."

Footsteps again, fainter this time, a mere brush against the floor.

Ryn's voice again, speaking for that foreign presence: _:Help me.:_


	10. Chapter 10

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

Author's note: Special thanks to the four incredible people who reviewed last time! Kelaria, pronker, estora, and what-ansketil-did-next, this chapter is for you!

* * *

><p><strong>CHAPTER TEN:<strong>

The Chiss Commander peered at the read-out a moment longer. "Still no response from the planet, I assume?"

"No, sir."

He nodded decisively. "Fall back to base. I want to speak with the prisoner."

"Sir, our orders -"

"Are to monitor activity on the planet they call Loreth. Which we cannot do if it tears itself to space dust. Set course for base camp."

"Yes, sir."

The commander rubbed his upper lip thoughtfully. "We'll see what Orun has to say now that _we_ are not his homeworld's most immediate danger."

* * *

><p>"Ryn? Psst! Ryn."<p>

Ryn dragged her face out of the dirt and shot Anakin a questioning look. "Yeah?"

Crouched behind a sparse-looking bit of scrub, Anakin frowned at her and shifted his weight. "You really think this will work? We'll find Obi-Wan?"

_You'd know as much about it as I do._ "I hope so," Ryn answered cautiously. Anakin felt ... anxious, fretful, so she pulled back from the ridgeline a little and added, "All we can do is try."

"There is no -"

"What do you think we're doing here?"

It almost made him smile. _He's changed so much. We all have._

Anakin's next works were so quiet she almost didn't catch them. "I guess this isn't exactly the homecoming you imagined."

The only answers Ryn had for that were strewn with pitfalls. She tried the easiest one: "I've never had much imagination, anyway."

"I just -" Anakin stopped, and she caught the hitch in his breathing when he remembered not to clear his throat, lest they draw attention from the _ghovhlain_ camp below them - servants of Khalî, like the Bolg, but possessed of a cruel intelligence and therefore far more dangerous. "I know you're doing this for _me_, and I -"

"Hey." Ryn shot him a quick, stern glance. "I'm doing it for Obi-Wan, all right? Don't get all overwrought."

It was hard to tell whether Anakin's presence was relieved or chagrined. Maybe a little of both. "Oh. Well. Okay, then."

Ryn wriggled back a few more inches, just far enough to punch him lightly on the arm. "I can think of some things I'd like to do _to_ you ..."

"Yeah, yeah, okay. I get it."

They both deserved better, but on scout duty was not the time to try and sort out all their issues. And some of them could probably never be really sorted out, anyway. Some things stayed with you forever. "Come on," Ryn said instead. "Let's go play heroes."

_Somebody has to._

* * *

><p><em>:Help me.:<em>

Obi-Wan sat up, his head clearing a little, unexpectedly. "Help you _how_?"

_:The Empty One. He is ... wrong.:_

The entity's expression of _wrong_ was like a cancer: something twisted, unnatural.

"I thought you wanted death."

_:Death. Yes.:_ A curious sense of memory, years of slaughter and tears and ... Ryn, standing in a cold stone chamber, saying, "I will go." _:Death brings life. Sacrifice.:_

"I don't understand."

Cold laughter, cold but not unkind. _:Neither does he. The Empty One.:_

And he had no idea what that meant. "How do you know Ryn?"

Momentary perplexity. _:Daughter.:_ Hesitantly.

"She's your _daughter_?"

_:All my daughters.:_ Even more hesitantly: _:Long-children.:_ A rush of images, those pale Lorethan faces with sharp features and dark hair. All dying, one way or another. And at the end three women, impossibly beautiful, torn apart. _:Our ... ending. Also a beginning.:_

It made too much sense, and not enough. These people were clearly Ryn's ancestors, but what had _happened_ to them? And more important: what was happening on Loreth _now_?

_:Help me. Help them.:_

"How?" Obi-Wan asked the empty room.

_:All things die.:_ Pause, and he could _feel_ the entity's effort to search for the right words. _:The Way of Sacrifice.:_

* * *

><p>"Greetings. I am Count Dooku of Serenno."<p>

"Why are you here?"

'I am exploring the far reaches of our galaxy to -"

"You have entered Lorethan sovereign space. Turn back and you will not be harmed."

"If I might speak with a representative -"

"I represent my home planet." The voice on the other end was not hostile, but _sure_. "Stand by for jump coordinates and escort."

"Thank you, but I do not require -"

"Stand by," the voice repeated, and cut the channel.

* * *

><p>They rode through empty wastelands where no one lived, not even birds and beats. Their steps were dogged by the Bolg, but that was to be expected: they had known this wouldn't be easy. They kept scouts, outriders with a sharp eye for trouble, and avoided fighting when they could.<p>

They still lost hands.

They were still maybe two days out from the place they sought - by their best estimates, which were none too certain - when Ryn, who was scouting ahead to try and find a way between _ghovhlain_ territories, sneaking her way along a ridge with her face pressed to the ground, smelled something that brought her up short.

For a second, it smelled exactly like Anakin's favorite workspace in the Temple, and Ryn was sure she was hallucinating - finally losing it for real, after skirting the edge for all these months. But then reality hit her like a hammer - a very _cold_ hammer, up here in the tundra - and she drew in a breath.

"Evinne," she called, very softly.

Five meters away, Evinne shifted in her frog-like pose, the widespread all-fours crouch scouts used for crawling quick an quiet, and twisted around enough to raise an eyebrow at her.

"Smells like Anakin's tinkerings," Ryn whispered hoarsely, tapping the ground for emphasis. "Engine grease, hyperdrive fuel."

Evinne eased closer to her position. "Omega?"

"That'd be my guess."

"Hell."

Ryn was shaking so hard she could see it, a shudder in her vision as she moved, out of sync with the slow spin of her home planet on its axis. "He'll be close."

"Yeah." Evinne sounded hoarse; Ryn watched her wet her chapped lips, feeling as though everything were happening in slow motion. "Maybe we're closer to the Womb of Death than we thought."

Ryn frowned. "It's supposed to be at the top of the world," she said. That'd be the Pole. Which has ice, not tundra."

The look Evinne gave her said she was putting up with Ryn's laboriously unnecessary explanation only because she was a very patient person. "Maybe 'top of the world' was poetic exaggeration," she suggested. "Anyway, if Omega's ship has _been_ here, we have to find it. And destroy it, before he can get away."

"You think escape is his plan?" Ryn asked, forehead wrinkling under the frost.

"I think we'd better not take the chance," Evinne answered. "Besides, a guy like Omega wouldn't be caught too far from his escape route."

"Right." Ryn had been so focused on finding Obi-Wan, she had almost forgotten their original mission in this system. "So he's in the area."

"You read it differently?"

_Right now, I don't read anything at all._ Ryn shook her head and backed slowly down the ridge into the brush. "Let's go tell Anakin."

* * *

><p>Skywalker took the news about as well as a rock flies, which is to say: <em>not very<em>. Evinne clenched her jaw and tried to remember hat he was a kid, whose father-figure was missing, on a strange planet. Plus whatever he had going on with Ryn, the severed bond thing that they were only _maybe_ on their way to getting over and Evinne didn't _want_ to understand.

But he was a kid who was older than Ryn, and when Evinne was his age she'd been racketing around the Outer Rim as a mercenary - because she could, because it was exciting, because it beat the hell out of her other options.

"Okay, look," she said, holding up a hand to stave off Skywalker's burgeoning panic. He fell silent, uncharacteristically docile, and in the quiet that was left Evinne slowly realized that Skywalker and Ryn were both watching her expectantly, two pairs of eyes wide and waiting.

_Oh, fuck them anyway._ She opened her mouth to tell them so, but what came out was, "Skywalker. Get a grip, here. You'd have felt it if anything had happened to your master, right? The bond thing?"

"I can't feel him at all," Anakin said, shifting nervously from foot to foot.

"But the bond is still there?"

"Yeah."

"So Obi-Wan is still alive, which means our job is still to find him," Evinne pointed out. "The only thing that's changed is that now we know we're on the right track." She paused. "In case you hadn't noticed, that's _good_ news."

"Right," said Anakin, his face clearing a little.

"Ryn," she went on, turning to the younger girl. "If Omega had ships just wandering around the surface, the defense scanners would have picked that up. He's got a hiding place."

"Like maybe in the cave we we're looking for," said Orun, her reaction deadpan.

What went on behind Ryn's still mask of a face was her own business. "As for example," Evinne said.

"So we need scouts," Ryn concluded. "More of them, I mean. Unless ... this close, Anakin might be able to sense Khalî as a disturbance in the Force."

The boy looked worried. "The Dark Side -"

"Is what we're looking for," said Ryn. "If you stopped fighting it for a minute, could you feel the direction?"

"If I stop fighting it," Anakin said, and stopped to wet his lips, "If I stop fighting it, I don't know if I can ... come back."

Ryn frowned at him, and Evinne wondered whether she were making any more sense of this than Evinne was. It sounded like so much Jedi nonsense, to her: they weren't asking Skywalker to _go_ anywhere, just to delve into the Force enough to sense the center of the disturbance. One would think Jedi must do that sort of thing all the time - although, if they couldn't, that would certainly explain how the Sith had been able to escape so many times.

Probably another thing Orun would say she wasn't supposed to know about. _Too bad._

"Let me be your anchor," Ryn was saying to Anakin. "I've offered before, but ..."

Evinne didn't know _but what,_ but evidently Skywalker did, because he met her eyes and slowly nodded.

"I trust you," he said - which, given their recent history, sounded like recklessness to Evinne. But she wasn't privy to the subtexts of their interactions, so she kept her thoughts to herself and hoped for the best.

It was all she could handle right now, anyway.

Anakin reached for Ryn, who was doing a good job of looking like a fairy-tale princess, all beautifully vulnerable with her heart in her green eyes, and Ryn was just reaching back to let him take her hands, when a shriek like an angry demon shredded the air above them and Chiss fighters swept down through the sky.


	11. Chapter 11

**Disclaimer:** George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

**Author's note:** A glottal stop (for which you can find the internationally recognized symbol by googling "IPA chart"), is - as Giles of BtVS fame once said, "a gulping noise." More precisely, "stops" in linguistics refer to consonants made by closing the airway completely, just for a second: for instance, the letters t, p, and k are all "stops." (They are also all voiceless, which means the vocal chords do not vibrate while stopping the airflow.) Moving backward through the articulatory space: A p is a bilabial stop. A t is a dental stop. A k, for most people, is a velar stop. A glottal stop is the sound made by closing the airway at the glottis, just behind where you would close it to make a 'k' sound.' Some dialects of English contain this sound in the ordinary way of speaking: a number of British accents, for instance, will substitute it for the 'tt' in "bottle." And most English speakers will make it if asked to put a quick pause between two vowels. In a number of other languages, it is a recognized consonant, on a par with 'g' or 'b' or whathaveyou. And this chapter is dedicated to Dr. Christy, who will certainly never see it, but in whose class I learned all the stuff I just explained to you, however ineptly.

* * *

><p><strong>CHAPTER ELEVEN<strong>

Ryn hit the ground, dragging Anakin with her in case the shriek of incoming fighters wasn't enough of a warning for him. All around her, warriors were diving for cover, wrapping their arms around their heads as though that would protect them from a strafing run at this range. Sometimes training overrode common sense.

She couldn't hear anything over the roar of the fighters - probably wouldn't hear anything for an hour, if she lived that long - but Anakin caught her arm and turned her to face him, lips moving, and Ryn had a pretty fair idea of his question, because she was asking it herself: _what the hell?_

There was no point in yelling back at him - he wouldn't be able to hear any more than she did - so Ryn just shook her head in frustration and scanned the terrain for better cover.

The problem was, there _wasn't_ any. They had reached the tundra now, the frozen arid wastes that extended for leagues around Khalî's ancient hiding grounds, where the only things that tread the bleak landscape were her creatures. The dry hills grew scrub, pitiful thorny bushes clinging to bare dirt, but not much else. Nothing that would hide them from the keen eyes and keener sensors of Chiss fighter pilots.

The fighters were coming around for another pass and Ryn was giving the order to spread out, waving frantically at the deafened warriors, when it turned out not to matter anyway. The fighters spun in the air and _dropped_, setting down on the tumbled hillside.

Ryn caught Makesh's eye and signaled, and he started wrangling their forces into a semblance of order while the Chiss took their time about settling into a landing formation that spread out across the slope. By the time the Chiss had powered down, the looked a little less like a flock of panicked kitchen fowl, though still nothing like the array of warriors that had met the Chiss at Feruil Shanhion.

The Chiss climbed out of their fighters, standing ready, and Ryn stepped forward, Anakin and Evinne flanking her without needing to be asked.

"Greetings," she said slowly, about the only word she could manage in Cheunh without sounding like an asthmatic cat.

The pained look on their commander's face told her it was still a long way from perfect pronunciation. "Greetings," he returned anyway. I am Commander -" He rattled off a typically unpronounceable series of clicks and glottals. Ryn couldn't have spelled it with a whole library full of dictionaries, but she saw the bars on his collar and caught the _'nuruodo_ at the end, and that told her what she mostly needed to know.

"Areth'ryn Orun," she identified herself. "Commander in the Lorethan Voluntary Militia." _Voluntary, my ass,_ she thought, and barely restrained herself from wincing over the _Adept_ she'd never earned. "Currently Warlord to to Jedi Padawan Anakin Skywalker." She indicated Anakin with a quick gesture to her right. "And this is Lieutenant-Adept Aesin-Evinne Ardel, newly chosen Prince of her clan." She cleared her throat. It was very bad manners, but ... "I'm guessing this is not a pleasure visit."

The Chis commander inclined his head and offered a string of syllables Ryn had no hope of following.

"Evinne?"

"Something about our High Command," Evinne answered unhappily. "That's all I got."

"Great," Ryn muttered. She met the commander's eyes and enunciated carefully: "Not in Cheunh, please."

The commander cycled through a couple more attempts in languages Ryn didn't recognize before Anakin suddenly jerked to alert beside her. "He's speaking Huttese."

"Thank all the gods," said Ryn, not in a mood to be picky. "Can you talk to him?"

Anakin gave her a dark look - he liked speaking Huttese about as much as most beings like having their teeth pulled - but he spouted a stream of choppy phonemes at the Chiss and listened to what he said back.

"He wants to know if you are aware that Loreth is being torn apart by some kind of erratic - _chaotic_, maybe that's a better word - energy beneath the surface. he says he has tried to talk to your, um, head of the family?"

"The high king," Ryn supplied. "Unless he means Kit, but probably not."

"And he won't bargain with them.

"_Bargain?_"

"The Hutts only have two words for talking: _bargain _and _insult_," Anakin said, with unusual asperity. "Probably because that's all they ever do."

Now wasn't the time to explore Anakin's childhood issues, linguistic or otherwise. And lexical vagaries aside, what it meant was that Commander Glottal Stop did not have sanction to be here. "Ask him what he thinks we can do about it."

Anakin spoke; Ryn ignored the urge to lean into his shoulder and focused on watching the Chiss commander instead, searching his reaction as he responded to Anakin's inquiry.

"He says that although the high king claimed to have no knowledge of the energy fluctuations, the presence of a Lorethan warband so near the source of the disturbance suggests some awareness of the problem."

"Tell him we have been out of contact," Ryn said. "And ask him _how_ near?"

It wasn't hard to see what the Chiss thought of the relayed message. His glowing eyes swept over her, sharp and canny. "You don't know," he said in Cheunh, slowly enough that she could follow, and Ryn shook her head.

His next burst of speech made Anakin frown. "He says whatever we're going to do, we have to do it fast. The planet's crust will begin to shred itself in less than two rotations."

"_Khalî,_" Evinne said grimly, and Ryn had to agree.

"We have to finish what we started," she answered, her own voice not much better. "Loreth can't be caught in this kind of tug of war forever. We have to free the underworld from Khalî's grip, once and for all."

"Just like that," Evinne muttered.

Ryn ignored her. "Ask him if they say any caves on their fly-by."

That took some time; evidently the word for _cave_ required some negotiation. Finally Anakin said, "He says no, but I don't trust him. Ryn, what -"

"Ask him what his interest in our problems is." Beat. "Please."

Anakin gave her a dark look, but he did as she asked. "He would hate to see such a beautiful world and potential ally destroyed," he said. "He offers his help."

Ryn gave the Chiss a skeptical look. "And in return?"

"Better relation between our two peoples," Anakin translated. His voice turned grim. "Now he asks a question of his own. Do you know Kitraal Orun?"

"Brother," said Ryn in Cheunh, glancing back at the commander.

"He's asking if we know where he is," Anakin reported. "He wants to speak - I think this time he really does mean 'bargain,' or maybe 'negotiate' - with him."

Ryn met the Chiss's glowing eyes. "I was told your forces captured him weeks ago."

Anakin said, "He admits there was a bad deal - a skirmish, that's it. But he claims your brother was rescued by a ship of unfamiliar design."

Evinne's sharp intake of breath was loud in the stillness. "Omega," she said. "It has to be."

Ryn cast her a quick frown. "What would he be doing in the middle of a battle?"

"I don't know," said Evinne. "But it fits."

"Time will tell," Ryn said. Or not: all too often the fate of MIAs remained unknown for generations. But it was the kind of thing Sarta would have said, cryptically knowing in the face of his troops. "Right now, if he wants to 'bargain' with Clan Orun, he's got me."

Anakin relayed this information. "He says he would have asked your brother's permission to land and offer assistance, and now he asks you the same."

"Little late," Ryn muttered. But beggars could not be choosers. "Bid him welcome, and tell him he and his warriors can help us by finding a hole in the surface."

Evinne gripped her arm and hauled her closer to hiss in her ear. "You can't seriously be planning to negotiate with the Chiss!"

"I don't have much of a choice," Ryn muttered back. "If he's right, we don't have time to try and scout on our own."

"But -" Evinne cut herself off. "No, you're right. I don't have to like it, that's all."

"Yeah, same here." Ryn tugged her arm loose and faced the Chiss commander, so she could say, in Cheunh that she knew was horribly mangled, if sincere: "Thank you."


	12. Chapter 12

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

* * *

><p><strong>CHAPTER TWELVE<strong>

Anakin blinked grit out of his eyes and translated for Ryn. He could sense Evinne's nervousness, the collective fear of the troops gathered behind them, but Ryn felt _sure_, a steady presence in the midst of the turmoil. That was good. _Probably_.

The blue-skinned humanoids with the glowing eyes seemed to accept her proposal - that they search for caves in the surrounding terrain and report back - easily enough, but they were obviously skeptical of her insistence that they leave the engagement to her war-band.

"The presence of outsiders, however well-meaning, will be an added variable we don't need," she said decidedly, and Evinne nodded. "Besides, we have no way of targeting fighter weapons to spare Master Kenobi, and no way of gauging what high-powered weapons might do to the delicate balance here, in any case. Tell him that there are forces here he cannot understand, and he must let us deal with them in our own way."

"Right," said Evinne. "And that is ... how, exactly?"

"One problem at a time," said Ryn.

That didn't sound very reassuring.

* * *

><p>The Force rushed in like a dark flood, drowning him in its immensity.<p>

_:Too much?_:

The flood eased back, and Obi-wan found he could breathe again. "What ... was that?"

_:Life.:_ Pause. _:The life of this place.:_

"You mean the Force."

:_Force?_: It was almost as though the entity _fluttered_, that sense of nervous uncertainty. _:I see your ... mind. Yes, Force. But we are all Force.:_

_ Well._ "What are you?"

_:Guardian.:_ The fluttering feeling again. _:I take the dead.:_ Something ... twisted, just out of reach. _:They worship me with death.:_

Obi-Wan shivered. But the thing felt ... lonely. "That sounds a bit macabre," he suggested.

_:No. I am Death, they give me Death.:_ A shiver of hesitation. _:But now no others. Gone, all gone. Both gone.:_

"Others?" said Obi-Wan, resting one hand on the cool, unworked stone of his prison as though he could reach her through the rock. "There were others like you?"

Sorrow, deep as the ages. :_Others. Not like me. I am the end of things. Death.:_

"Then what were the others?"

A rush of affection, sharp with loss. _:Youth. Fecundity.:_

The light burst behind his eyes so suddenly that it almost blinded him. "The cycle of life!" he gasped, feeling the universe fall into place around him. It was a very old philosophy, of course; the Jedi did not teach it any more. But he remembered ... Ryn had had something about it, three fingers clasping hands, joined in a circle, worked in embroidery on her old utility belt. He had not thought much of it at the time - if ancient dissidents from the Jedi Order had gone to Loreth, it was not so surprising they might carry forgotten the forgotten philosophies of the Core with them. But apparently here it was more.

_:A circle, yes.: _ That was definitely approval. _:Three. Always three. Gone now. Circle no more.:_

"You are the last," Obi-Wan breathed. His weariness fell from his limbs and he stood straighter, enraptured. "How old_ are_ you?"

But he could tell the question did not mean anything to his interlocutor. _:Old, yes. Ending. All things die.:_

"Is that what happened to the others?"

It showed him again, swift images in his mind: the three women, beautiful as life. And ... a war?

_:Gone,:_ the entity told him, and Obi-Wan realized that tears were running down his own cheeks as he stood. _:Alone. They bring me sacrifices._:

"I still don't understand what you want me to do," Obi-Wan said quietly. "Knowing you are unhappy doesn't give me much to go on."

_:The Empty One. Away.:_

So this being wanted him to get rid of Omega. And somehow, she had given him back the Force, to do it with.

"I'll do my best," he promised her.

* * *

><p>The earthquakes, off in the distance, were getting worse.<p>

"I don't understand," Evinne said through gritted teeth, holding onto her frightened sleipnir's reins. "If the tectonic stresses are a result of the dark goddess's power, shouldn't we be standing at the epicenter? And we're clearly not."

"Maybe not," said Ryn, trying to keep a grip on her own mount. "The stresses _could_ be a result of what _we_ did, urging the fields and forests to reject Khalî. In which case, the epicenter could be any place of active resistance."

"In case you hadn't noticed," said Anakin, holding his mount with an air of great concentration that suggested he was using the Force, "this is all academic. We have to stop these quakes, whatever -"

"I know, I know!" Ryn said, because she wasn't sure she could stand to be reminded again. She felt on the verge of screaming already. "We're working on it."

Actually, the Chiss were working on it, and she wasn't sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, the ciss were exceptionally efficient in the field - she knew that firsthand. On the other hand ... Ryn had a little _too much_ personal experience with them. she was probably never going to be comfortable within shouting distance of anybody with glowing red eyes.

The tremors died away and the war-band set itself slowly to rights, detangling dropped reins and checking for injuries. None serious, this time - they were getting better at this, even as the earthquakes were steadily getting worse.

The Chiss commander - he had remained with them while his men searched the surrounding area in their fighters - did not look encouraged. He grumbled something Halbad - an old retainer from home - was near enough to translate, but it wasn't anything Ryn couldn't have told him already: things were getting worse faster than they could asses the damage.

The troops were watching her warily, probably wondering what kind of warlord got her help from the enemy.

_Yeah, well, give me an alternative and we'll talk_.

Evinne was more reasonable. She sidle close and surveyed the flyover with an air of grim resignation. "You know you could be brought up on treason charges for this, don't you?"

"Only if it doesn't work out," Ryn answered, matching Evinne's low tone. "In which case it won't matter anyway."

"Clever little witch," Evinne muttered, her admiration half-grudging.

"Well, I try."

She could feel Evinne studying her. "You okay, Shorty?" she asked finally. "Besides all this, I mean."

"If by 'all this' you mean _my life_," Ryn said, gesturing at their current predicament, "then yeah, I'm great."

Evinne snorted. "Yeah, okay, stupid question." She nudged Ryn with a shoulder. "Skywalker?"

Ryn glanced over her shoulder at Anakin, who was talking to Makesh. "Once we get Obi-Wan back -"

"No - I mean, how are _you_ about Skywalker?" The older girl shot a look at Ryn's face. "I'm reading a lot of ... _energy_, there. Are you ... you know ... going to be okay?"

Ryn bit down on her lip to keep it from twitching. "Are you trying to do the whole sympathy thing?"

Evinne glowered at the skyline. "Maybe."

"Hidden depths, Ardel." Ryn nudged her back. "I'll be okay." She let out a breath. "It might take a while."

The noise of the fighters rushed over them, the ground trembled, and several of the sleipniri broke loose and ran.

"I hear you," said Evinne.


	13. Chapter 13

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.

Author's note: I am experimenting with creating different moods through tense changes. The efficacy of this attempt is open to question.

**CHAPTER THIRTEEN**

She came to him in his dreams, wearing Ryn's face. Obi-Wan wondered idly whether she had stolen Ryn's image, her voice, from his own memories, or if she just knew that much about what happened on the planet's surface.

_:Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.: _

There was something different about her. Obi-Wan reached into the Force, still muddy, and did not trust his eyes.

"You've grown stronger," he said finally.

_:They make sacrifice,:_ she said. The figure ... ripened, before his eyes. Not so much _Ryn_ as what Ryn might look like in a decade or so. Fuller, softer, more desiring. _:They ... feed me.:_ She ran her phantom hands up Obi-Wan's chest. _:But it's _your_ devotion I want.:_

"I thought you wanted my help."

_:They are the same.:_ She leaned in and kissed him hungrily. _:Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.:_ She smiled against his mouth. _:I will reward you.:_

"What is your name?" Obi-Wan asked. Distantly he reflected that only in a dream could he talk and kiss at the same time.

_:My lovers call me Khalî.:_

: : :

He surrenders to the dream, letting the Force run through him as Khalî takes his body. Her knowledge of pleasure is timeless, undeniable: she understands his body as though she has already learned all his secrets.

_:Love me,:_ she whispers, and Obi-Wan turns into her and lets instinct take over.

: : :

The Chiss warriors return in a couple of hours with the information that there is a sort of cleft, leading deep into the planet's crust, some ten miles away (though figuring out that it's ten miles takes some work). It is surrounded by what Commander 'Nuruodo calls "animals" but Ryn knows are the creatures of Khalî - not possessed of free will, and therefore not _sentient_ in the usual sense, but terribly intelligent just the same.

"Good," she says, straightening from the readouts 'Nuruodo has handed her with substantially more confidence than she feels. "We move in at once. Evinne, you're with me. Choose your team. Makesh, you will take the remainder of our force and hold the entry _at all costs_. If things go sideways in there, I want a retreat." If things went sideways in there - and Ryn can't quite make herself believe they won't - they aren't going to live to use any retreat, but saying _let's go find new and exciting ways to die_ would probably not be good for morale. "Any questions?"

"I'm going after Obi-Wan," Anakin says, already spoiling for a fight.

Ryn fixes her stare on him, pretending hard not to worry, comforting herself with the knowledge that at least she won't have to outlive him. "That wasn't a question."

Anakin reddens, but he hangs on stubbornly. "I just wanted to make sure we were clear."

"Fine," says Ryn. "We're clear." She surveys the group with a brook-no-nonsense expression she learned from Kit.

He did it a lot better.

"Anyone else?"

Silence.

"Good," she says, pretending that it is, and this time she feels the energy humming in her blood. "Let's go be heroes."

: : :

_:This one,:_ Khalî says, reaching for him as her manifestation ... shifts, an unnerving display of power and transigence. She wraps Evinne's arms around Obi-Wan's neck, pressing warmly closer. _:You like this form better?:_

Obi-Wan leans away from her embrace. "I prefer your true self."

_:You mean as I would prefer you without these?:_ She tugs playfully at his Jedi robes.

Obi-wan suppresses a shiver at this demonstration that Khalî's facility with accessing and influencing the physical world is growing at an alarming rate. Not that he senses evil intent in her, exactly - she has done nothing to harm him, after all, despite ample opportunity - but _so much power_, in a being so steeped in darkness ... he can feel it, permeating the very air in the chamber, moving in and through Khalî until he cannot decide whether she is its source or its victim, and the possibilities of either are terrifying.

"It isn't the same," Obi-Wan tells her repressively.

Khalî draws back to stare at him with Evinne's luminous blue eyes, not blinking quite often enough. _:You want all of me?:_ she whispers, wonderingly, and takes his mouth and his common sense at once.

: : :

The march is conducted in quick, furtive bursts, always with scouts outlying the group. "Stay close," Ryn whispers to Anakin, and he opens his mouth to tell her again that he doesn't need protecting and then thinks, _Maybe she does._

He hovers near enough to touch as they pass the first sentries - a nest of dhraghol, practically commonplace, after all this time in the wilderness - and move deeper into the wasteland, fetid with decay.

The Lorethans are grim and silent as they move over the frozen land, stony faces giving nothing away. But the Force is turbulent with an undercurrent of darkness, and its river is stained with their bleeding fear. Anakin fights it, tries to shut it out, but the voices of terror are loud and his own fear is like a cold smoke, winding around his heart.

They have almost reached the second hurdle - a thin ring of ghovhlain camps stretched about a kilometer away from the chink the rock that is their goal - when the ground moves, more rhythmically than the first torn earthquakes, and _something_ washes over them that is neither the Lorethans' own fear nor the sense of darkness that pervades this place.

"Ryn!" Evinne's voice comes out in a hiss. "What - was that -"

Ryn shakes her head; she is crouching close enough that Anakin can feel her shift. "I don't know."

"That felt like the galaxy's biggest _orgasm_," Evinne says, her voice breathy with uncertainty.

"Then maybe we'll find Khalî in a good mood," Ryn says, straight-faced, and the ripple of hushed, half-hysterical laughter that runs through the group is jangled with nerves. Anakin wonders if this is what Ryn misses: the hard-won camaraderie of soldiers on campaign, fraught with adrenaline and loyalty and desperate need.

She turns to him to share the joke, and it hits him in the chest, sudden and blindingly real: he's part of this, too. Weeks hunting and fighting and almost dying beside Loreth's warrior children have made him belong. He's as much Orun now as he ever will be a Jedi.

Three weeks ago, most of these beings didn't even _know_ him. Now they are risking everything - their lives, their honor, their home _planet_ - to help him save a man they've never met before. Anakin can't _breathe_ around the thought. But when Ryn frowns a question at him: _what?_ he pulls himself together and gives her a shaky smile and a nod: _I'm okay_.

They start forward again, hugging the foul-smelling ground; but then something _gives_ again, softer this time but still rolling over them, and Anakin draws up short with a startled cry. "_Obi-Wan!"_

: : :

Ryn jerked her eyes to Anakin's face, ready to panic or to despair, but what she read there was not fear, but joy. "Anakin?" she asked cautiously.

"He's alive!" Anakin reported, tears in his eyes. "I can feel him!"

That might change the game significantly. Ryn crouched on her heels to consider. "Do you have a direction?"

Anakin shook his head. "But I could follow the bond to him."

"Okay," said his warlord, bracing herself. "Take point."


End file.
